The Memory Machine

The main idea for “The Memory Machine” is acceptance that the act of remembering is always an act of deconstruction and transformation.
The interdisciplinary walk-in installation by MOUVOIR/Stephanie Thiersch uses reports by contemporary witness to bring dance history from 1980 and 2000, a period marked by new concepts and styles, to life. Statements are collected in an associative process, are entered into a machine that imitates the workings of the brain. Visitors encounter the collection of memories via sound, text and live performance. They set their own priorities, re-associate and bring dance history into the present moment via the senses.
It is a walk-in and tangible storehouse of memories, which understands narration and association as carriers of memory. In this way, one encounters both well-known and forgotten figures of dance, and gains insights into the complexity of artistic and personal relationships, – the consequences of which continue to shape and influence ideas and realities of dance to this day. Each memory is a new story that disassembles and reassembles the existing. It is rarely linear and certainly not congruent with the “real processes“.

The Memory Machine is a poetic and humorous translation of how the brain works when we re-member. How we always deconstruct and reconstruct the actual lived events. How we (un)consciously erase or add facts. How memory is always subjective and selective. We fed the machine with personal memories from the 80ies and 90ies by key players in the German dance scene: choreographers, dancers, presenters, critics and academics. The 80ies and 90ies was an extremely fertile period in which the heritage of German Tanztheater got both renewed and challenged by the further internationalization of the contemporary art and dance scene. The history is recent enough to have only first-hand witnesses but already there is a distance in time, rewriting the factual events.
The core of the machine randomly triggers fragments of these personal memories, archived on audio tracks. Other voices, the spectator has to catch out of the air and more lines of memory fragments are spun across the space as a spider web or are literally shredded. All our experiences are mediated by our senses, also our memories. The Memory Machine is a visual labyrinth in which you have to find your way. It is a murmuring space in which you have to focus your attention in order to hear fragments of a collective memory. These fragments can be put together in a free and associative way. The machine invites you to wander around and interact with it, gathering different fragments and by doing so reconstructing your own (hi)stories.
We are all memory machines.
(Guy Cools)

With memories of:

Cornelia Albrecht, Gabriele Brandstetter, Dieter Buroch, Dana Caspersen, Guy Cools, Ingo Diehl, Luc Dunberry,
Viviana Escalé, Kerstin Evert, Sigrid Gareis, Thierry Guiderdoni, Claudia Henne, Walter Heun, Reinhild Hoffmann, Rui Horta, David Kern, Hanna Koller, Juan Kruz Diaz de Garaio Esnaola, Heike Lehmke, Bettina Masuch, Anita Mathieu, Jean-Paul Montanari, David Morrow, Bertram Müller, Gabriele Naumann-Maerten, Kajo Nelles, Micha Purucker, Jan Pusch, Martin Puttke, Omar Rajeh, Madeline Ritter, Vera Sander, Jochen Sandig, Katja Schneider, Katharina Sehnert, Gerald Siegmund, Meg Stuart, Virve Sutinen, Christiane Theobald, Helena Waldmann, Arnd Wesemann

A project of TANZFONDS ERBE