MEMORY, SPEAK! About the present and some future events

The future has always been there. It waits to be revived in the unrealised emancipatory projects of the past.

In the performance Memory, Speak! it emerges in polyphonic biographical narratives. Discourses and debates about memory culture are not featured, but rather the act of remembering and people's memories themselves – in all their detail, precariousness and brilliant incoherence. On three stages of memory, widely separated places, times, events, foreign and personal experiences, the present and the absent intersect. The audience and listeners can move freely around the space and tune in to the individual stations on different channels via infrared headphones.

A project by the Mobile Academy Berlin in collaboration with: 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.


CASTING for a long-term documentary

The Mobile Academy Berlin has invited nine candidates to test their memory skills in a two-day casting session in front of a three-member jury – live in front of an audience. Are the candidates suitable protagonists for a long-term documentary film that will follow them over ten years to capture how they will have experienced the coming decade? The jury, consisting of experienced interviewers, is particularly interested in the analytical or intuitive ability of the casting candidates to reveal possible futures in their memories and biographies. The subsequent long-term documentary film will be realised over the next ten years by Russian-born, Vienna-based artist Anna Jermolaewa.


RADIO REHEARSAL The Black Caribbean, Memory Techniques for Approximating Ghosted Realities

We listen to the rehearsal of a radio programme. In loops and fragments, in words, music and sound, it returns to something that should never be remembered. The programme is about El Corte, the forgotten parsley massacre in the Dominican Republic in 1937 – one of the most comprehensively silenced genocides of the 20th century. How do you talk about lives that have been cut out of history and yet continue to pulsate beneath it, persistently and rebelliously disrupting the plantation logics that determine the present? The radio broadcast by Sarah Lewis-Cappellari and Anton Kats tunes into frequencies of what simply refuses to disappear: sounds and dreams, fragments of memory and family stories, literary and poetic traces conjure up the spirits that have been expelled from the archives.


VIDEO PERFORMANCE Kasala Continuum

Kasala means invocation or incantation in Tshiluba. According to a definition by E.M. Mirembe, it is a poem of praise recited by professional reciters at funerals and other family celebrations. It captures the attention of a community for many hours and presents individuals and biographies in vivid language that brings together those present and absent, the dead and the living. A video installation by Mukenge/Schellhammer shows a performance by Kasala reciter Cécile Tuseku for the Congolese art scene in Kinshasa. It opens up a performative space of collective memory for the actors and ancestors of the scene, telling of biographies and initiations, artistic movements and relationships. Her recitation is accompanied by live performances by the poet and performer Fiston Mwanza Mujila.


Venue: Academy of Arts (AdK) Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin

Friday, 12 December, 7 p.m.–11 p.m.
€15/9

Saturday, 13 December, 3 p.m.–10 p.m.
€15/9 (3 p.m.–6 p.m. and 7 p.m.–10 p.m. respectively)
€20/10 (day ticket)

In German and English with simultaneous translation:


In cooperation with the Academy of Arts. Supported by the Capital Cultural Fund Berlin. Accompanied by a research project by Co.Lab Remembrance Work – Aesthetic-Political Practices / University of Art and Design Linz.