How many days have you been alive? How many of those days can you recall?
This performance was about what is left of our lives in the end, how we might assemble the fragments, and hopefully how we might make some kind of sense from it all.
What really will we leave behind?
I performed two versions of The Remains of Memory, a week apart. The first version was a performance for one person at a time in Regina, Canada. The second still had individual interactions, but other members of the audience were sitting around the table and could listen and add their memories. That performance took place a week later at the Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival in Utah, USA. Both performances happened in libraries in public spaces where the activity could be viewed through windows from a main hallway.
The performance began by my inviting someone to sit with me, and asking if they wanted to know how many days they had been alive. Using an app on my phone, I entered their day, month and year of birth, and the program calculated the number of days from their birth to the current day. Immediately they became aware of how many thousands of days they had already lived.
I asked if they wanted to try to remember one of those days. If they agreed, I opened a book of calendars from 1950 to 2050. I asked the person to flip through the pages with their eyes closed, and randomly put their finger on a date.
Then I asked them what they remembered about that day. Rarely was someone able to recall specifics of the exact day. By asking questions about what age they were, where they were living, who their friends were at that time, if they were in school, etc., each person was able to access more and more memories and was able to reconstruct and describe something of that time. I was not alone in being surprised by how many memories began to rise to the surface a we took the time to recall an earlier period of our lives.
Spread out the table where we were sitting I had a wooden jigsaw puzzle that we worked on while conversing. We were assembling an image of my own memory, made from a photograph from my past. But without the picture on the box cover the task of reassembling it was very slow. We were piecing together fragments of images, trying to find the entire picture. It was a parallel task to the one I was asking people to do in recalling their own memories of a particular date in time.
