Bodies of Memory (2012)
For Bodies of Memory, a choric, embodied, simultaneous and 4-dimensional memory, Tate Britain's Clore Gallery was inhabited by a collective memory of many past performances, performed and spoken in passing fragments, rising and disappearing like memory itself. Gathered and orchestrated by Fiona Templeton, participants included performers, artists, writers, curators, and people who have watched something being done. Bodies of Memory asks how for performers the memory of past actions of the body remains, resurfaces, moves the body to those actions again, or their vestiges, and through the re-doing draw forth further memory and further action; how for viewers fragments of performances seen, and now told, rise to the surface of memory, perhaps incomplete, perhaps drawing further memory through the telling.
“Performance burns up in its very performing, and is gone. But in the bodies of its performers, in the minds’ eyes of its viewers, it is burned in, and can live again in action and telling, and be a new performance.”