Material, Tools and Strategies

Material Memory comprises three threads:

Our weekly studio practice which allows us to explore the materiality and textures of memory through touch, listening and improvisation. The studio is a safe space, and we practice rituals of mutual care. In times of Corona, we move to Zoom and video to dance together.
An ongoing conversation, with reflections on the physical practice, concept formation and critique, and exchange about our research. We document as much as possible, usually by note-taking, sometimes by recording and later transcribing the conversation. All documents are made available in our archive.
manifestations in performance, audio recording and videodance. We approach the media of audio, video and dance-performance as material. What if we place the camera above us, and later use the video footage as a canvas? What if we perform in a closed room? Does audience establish performance? Is our conversation a performance? Can audio capture nakedness? During the epidemic, audiovideo became our only medium.

These threads inform each other to form an ongoing practice. Through our living archive, we aim to make the traces of this practice accessible and tangible as an interwoven thread.

In the archive:

Recollections from the ongoing coversation

May 2, 2020.

Collection (Text)

in: Material and Tools

🛈 Accessing our Living Archive

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Corporeal Research

Material memory is situated, non-symbolic knowledge. How does it relate to hegemonial frames? We begin each session of our practice with a topic, connecting our practice with our societal situation. The following are some relations around material memory that we explored so far.

Woven memory (core memory) in computers in the 1950s and 60s were made by skilled women by hand. This embodied and feminized aspect of high tech is often glossed over in patriarchal history-writing. For us, it reaffirms the materiality of memory, as well as it being an artifact of labor. Resituating the memory in the body gives us a new perspective on programming and computer science, and challenges a fantasy of immaterial digital circulation without externalities.

In infancy, techne or embodied knowledge precedes and exceeds episteme, i.e. symbolic knowledge. Nevertheless, a patriarchal hegemony in cognitive sciences has preferred the latter and given it a higher ontological status. This preference is based on the conception of the modern (eurocentric) individuum as standing ‘above’ its world. Conversely, recent studies on what cognitive sciences call ‘implicit memory’ have stressed the embodied memory’s role in establishing intercorporeality and empathy, and discredited notions of a ‘theory of mind’ that are based on explicit or propositional knowledge. We want to resituate our knowledge and our ways of communication, acknowledging the language without symbols that we all share. Cognitivist research and theories on (infant) dyadic interaction thereby help us get rid of false assumptions.

Accepting our situatedness allows us to explore aesthetics outside the frame. This is why we try out alternative approaches to choreographic questions of composition, counterpoint, story and representation. Eschewing quick judgement also helps us keep the score minimal, tangible and accessible: everyone can enjoy and understand the processes at work as we dance; and everyone can join the material body practice.

Finally, we attempt to talk about what we are doing, knowing well that terms and concepts we use in symbolic language will never be congruent with our practice. Ongoing critique of our models, and exchange of perspectives may produce situated accounts, and prevent us from the fallacy of interpretation.

In the archive: The following text is being transferred into the archive.

Open Archive

Frames and Representation

February 2020

Until now, we have been rehearsing and researching weekly in a studio. Each session had a specific research question and warmup, followed by a long-duration dance improvisation. Additionally, we invited fellow dancers and choreographers to join our dance, give feedback, and bring in their respective practices.

As we are now looking for frames to perform and exhibit our work, we can think of the following settings:

Libraries, Museums, Public Buildings and Spaces: Public institutions such as Staatsbibliothek or Volksbühne in Berlin are the places where a society locates and reforms itself. Notions of citizenship, responsibility, (post)humanity, ontologies and knowlege, values, emancipation and conservation, and language are discussed and disseminated here. Our work extends the discourse of dyadic interaction as the basis of community formation to the realm of nonsymbolic language and to polyadic and blurry networks. We'd love this approach to find its place in the agoras of our society, and to find fruitful exchange with other contemporary civil discourses. While these institutions tend to employ a democratic and inclusive language, they equally function at the nexus of contemporary colonialism, arguably more so than private enterprises. Their very walls signify the asymmetry between hegemonial and subaltern world regions and bodies; their architectural genealogy traces back through modernism to modernity and the origins of primitive accumulation and colonialism. Our challenge is to over-affirm the disciplining function of the monuments in order abuse it to highlight the explicity of the body.
Art Gallery: As a space specifically designed by and for circulation, the art gallery is a synecdoche for capital circulation as a whole. It manifests art’s pioneering role in reforming the symbolic webs of exchange, be it in local gentrification, in the exploitation of the seemingly endless resource of ‘cultural capital’, or in reforming advertisement. On the other hand, the gallery shelters art from the immediate need for (e)valuation: by creating a liminal space in which the artwork is invited to work as a small totality, still separated and somewhat independent from the one that dominates our lives. In both cases, the autonomy of art codifies the absence of body and embodied knowledge: the gallery is a purely symbolic space in which the meaning of an artifact is disconnected from its materiality. Performance art plays a peculiar role in this setting as it brings the body into the realm of its pretended absense. A body in a gallery is the image of that body, and the excess of this body’s actual presence creates a thrilling and acute tension that cannot be resolved without tearing down the walls of the institution (the big decolonial project). Performance art’s increased relevance in the recent years coincides with the expansion of the art market and the ongoing virtualization of cultural capital, both contemporary and historic. But what happens if the performers cease symbolic language altogether? Will our dance split into the body of the dance on the one hand, and its image or symbolic reflection on the other side, with no theme or code to bridge the worlds? What value can a dance attain that wants to ‘say nothing’? This is what we’d love to explore in an art gallery.
Workshop and interactive performance: The material memory practice is an accessible dance. We’d love to share our methods and research questions with participants of all ages, and improvise together because the dance of everyone will reflect back on the practice and develop it further. For us, it is not a fixed set of methods or a score, but a living thing around a concept that, by definition, cannot say anything about what material memory actually is: time outside of symbolic language.
Dance Theatre: We’d love to explore notions of timing and storytelling, and of presence on a stage. How can a practice without meaning and time find itself on a stage, in a timeframe? How can we as memory cells process the information that this place gives us? How would we use sound, light, and the role of a narrator to create a bridge to the reality of audience? What would a narrator say? What challenges do we want to pose the audience? How do we program a progression in our dance, and is this actually nescessary? We have started to leverage the method of metaxis to establish and systematically develop the in-between of the material memory space and the audience space. By the myth, Penia (the goddess of poverty) raped Poros (the god of wealth) and bore Amor. His role is to suspend his parent’s polarity. In our case, to suspend the polarity between nonsymbolic knowledge and mediated communication, we see the medium as our Amor, the messenger of love, transcending the very notion of classification in opposites.

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