Output details

Surviving Objects

Bulmershe Theatre, University of Reading, 19-22 June 2013. The main research questions that Surviving Objects investigated focused on how the development of inter/trans-medial strategies can assist in: 1. publicly animating a personal archive; 2. performatively encapsulating recollection; 3. staging translational acts of oral-testimony; 4. inter/trans-culturally expressing a marginalised diasporic history. The 90-minute performance was based on 19 hours of sound-recorded interviews, conducted in Polish, with my 77-year-old mother. The title references my mother as survivor of the 1939/40 Soviet deportations of Poles to Siberia, and our conversations centred on a small personal archive from her time in a Rhodesian British-run refugee-camp (1942-48). I edited the interviews to form episodic narrative-fragments, excising my voice save for wordless interjections. The re-connected fragments highlighted both voices' materiality, forming the performance's sonically non-continuous soundscape. Each fragment addressed an 'everyday' object, investigating its mnemonic potency in relation to personal narrative loss/recovery, and problematising notions of trans-personal, collective memorialisation. Surviving Objects' trans/inter-mediality resided in its self-reflexive weaving of formal conventions associated with theatrical, cinematic, museum and gallery spaces; it channelled oral-testimony through the live/mediated exhibition of personal objects/memories. It explored the limits of materiality, memory and tactility, creating an environment in which the Kantorian 'live' presence of actors/objects existed in optic, ritualised tension with the hapticity of macro-lens, large-scale video-projections of those objects. Projections were 'overlaid' by textual-translation, which operated visually 'centre-screen', disrupting sub/sur-titling conventions. Drawing on research into inter/trans-culturality. East-European performance, memory studies, translation and diasporic histories, the performance’s trans/inter-medial languages expressed multiple translational-iterations of my mother's stories. Thus, I explored the subjectivity of a British-Polish woman through the prism of my feminist, second-generation bi-linguality, publicly disseminating the trans-generational contents of our remembering. In performatively re-constructing my mother-as-archive, I enabled the first theatrical articulation of what remains a politically-sensitive strand of East-Central-European and British-Colonial histories.