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Mediathek

MEMORY, SPEAK! On the Present and Some Future Events

  • Academy of Arts
  • Essay / Installation

The future has always been here. It awaits reanimation in the unrealized emancipatory projects of the past. In the performance Memory, Speak! it emerges through polyphonic biographical storytelling. Discourses and debates on memory culture are not the focus here. Instead, the act of remembering and the memories of the people themselves take to the stage: detailed, precarious, and magnificently incoherent. The installation and performance open a space of resonance in which visitors can encounter diverse techniques and forms of remembering over the course of two days.

The stage in Memory, Speak! functions as a “screen memory”— in both the literal and the psychological sense. Collective memory here is a game of addition, not a process of reduction. Everything is happening now; nothing is past; we are in the midst of it. Widely separated places, times, and events, strange and familiar experiences, what is present and what is absent — intersect across three stages of memory. Visitors can move freely through the space and tune into the various stations on different channels via infrared headphones.

Memory is the opposite of storing and retrieving. It is the accomplice of forgetting, comes over us rather than we come to it. It accepts no strict boundaries between yesterday and today, happens exactly now, and is oriented toward the future. It does not exist outside itself, it shifts, changes, and moves. It cannot tell what was, but what is to be told, or would have to be told. Damit lässt sich kein Staat machen – no state can be built on it – as the German proverb goes. Memory, Speak! opens a space of listening in which this particular form of memory can appear.

Memory, Speak! continues a line of memory projects by Mobile Academy Berlin that began a quarter century ago with the Branch Office for Temporary Remembering (inspired by Aleida Assmann) in Hamburg. It was followed by The Milieu of the Dead in Vienna and Berlin from 2013 to 2018, Dialogs from the Dark Room in Novosibirsk in 2016, as well as a series of projects developed in collaboration with the Colombian Truth Commission (Comisión de la Verdad) in Bogotá and Barrancabermeja between 2018 and 2021. The next stop for Memory, Speak! after Berlin will be Vienna in April 2026.

A collaboration between:

Aliaksei Bratachkin, Guillaume Cailleau, Vaginal Davis, Anselm Franke, Christian Fritzenwanker, Lamin Leroy Gibba, Shadi Habib Allah, Karin Harrasser, Alice Hasters, Heinrich Horwitz, Hannah Hurtzig, Marian Kaiser & Florian Stirnemann, Anna Jermolaewa, Aurélia Kalisky,
Nina Katchadourian & Sina Najafi, Sarah Lewis Cappellari & Anton Kats,  Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Mukenge/ Schellhammer, Farkhondeh Shahroudi, Jakob Racek, Susanne Sachsse, Eran Schaerf, Cécile Tuseku.

 

In cooperation with the Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts). Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Capital Cultural Fund). Accompanied by a research project of Co.Lab Remembrance work – aesthetic-political practices / University of Art and Design Linz.