Mome

We come together in Saari residency to cross our artistic and academic interests in exploring memory as a medium for arts and research creation. Relational philosophies and semiotic perspectives inform our investigative practices, priming for memory as relational rather than individual to include relations to all forms of life. From this understanding, memory is not just something that is stored and subsequently recollected. We will then explore memory as a process moving across the environment, instead of seeing it as a ‘thing’, placed within an individual person or object. Our frames of reference for memory deviate from ‘self-serving’, ‘self-reflection’ or ‘auto-analysis’ purposes, being rather interested in memory in relation to multiplicity from within struggling environments/groups. We are motivated to explore the entanglements between our different histories, racial categories, privileges, familiar environments to navigate into memory as a field of unknown possibilities, instead of a field that consolidates particularity and fixed identities. We join our diverse disciplinary expertises seeking for different understandings about how to explore remembrance, not as totems for singularized identities, but rather as processes that enhance connection and interdependence with communities and all living forms.

The four of us have been exploring memories as resources for creation, and we come together here to expand and complexify the approaches done so far. We have been exploring memories in dance, performance pedagogy, academic research, and visual arts. We will share with each other the praxis which have particularly inspired our memory work, in the format of mini-workshops. Camila Rosa explores practices of improvisation informed by autobiographical memories, decolonial and relational philosophies within the frames of her artistic PhD research project; Arlene Tucker is interested in the materiality of memory, coding/decoding/encoding memories as a meaning making process, written and visual forms of dialogue; Georgie Goater and Gesa Piper interests in memory sparks from their embodied somatic practices making sense of presences and absences in family histories.