In the organizer's words:

Are we the ones being forgotten?
Or: are we the ones being forgotten?

Mobile Academy Berlin

MEMORY, SPEAK!
About the present and some future events
Academy of the Arts, Hanseatenweg, Berlin

Memory problems? Let's try a different kind of memory theater. The Mobile Academy presents a performative proposal for a culture of remembrance in a migration society.

A project of 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.

The future was always there. It is waiting to be reanimated in the unrealized emancipatory projects of the past. In the performance Memory, Speak! it emerges in polyphonic biographical narratives. Discourses and debates about the culture of remembrance do not make an appearance, but the act of remembering and the memories of the people themselves do - in all their detail, precariousness and brilliant incoherence. On three stages of remembrance, widely divergent places, times, events, foreign and personal experiences, the present and the absent intersect. Viewers and listeners can move freely around the space and connect to the individual stations on different channels via infrared headphones.

CASTING for a long-term documentary

The Mobile Academy Berlin has invited nine candidates to test their memory skills in a two-day casting in front of a three-person jury - live in front of an audience. Are the candidates suitable protagonists for a long-term film documentary that follows them over ten years to record how they will have experienced the coming decade? The jury of experienced interviewers is particularly interested in the casting candidates' analytical or intuitive ability to flash up possible futures in their memories and biographies. The subsequent long-term film documentary will be realized over the next ten years by the 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 broadcast. In loops and breaks, in words, music and sound, it returns to something that was never meant to be remembered. The program 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 stubbornly disrupting the plantation logics that define the present? The radio broadcast by Sarah Lewis-Cappellari and Anton Kats tunes into the frequencies of what simply refuses to disappear: sounds and dreams, scraps of memory and family stories, literary and poetic traces conjure up the ghosts that have been expelled from the archives.

VIDEO PERFORMANCE Kasala Continuum

Kasala means invocation or conjuration 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 people and biographies in a pictorial language that brings together the present and the absent, the dead and the living. A video installation by Mukenge/Schellhammer shows a performance by Kasala speaker Cécile Tuseku for the Congolese art scene in Kinshasa. She 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 will be accompanied by live performances by the poet and performer Fiston Mwanza Mujila.

Friday, 12.12., 19:00 - 23:00 & Saturday, 13.12., 15:00 - 22:00, continuous admission (DE and EN with simultaneous translation). On Friday from 21:30 - 22:30 there will be a small market for useful knowledge (foyer version) with the artists present.

In cooperation with the Akademie der Künste. Supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin. Accompanied by a research project of the Co.Lab Erinnerungsarbeit - ästhetisch-politische Praktiken / Kunstuniversität Linz.

Further information on the project and the Mobile Academy Berlin can be found on the website and tickets are available here.

_{The venue is accessible for wheelchair users and people with mobility impairments; assistance will be provided if required.}

Price information:

Friday, 12.12. 19-23 € 15/9 Saturday, 13.12. 15-22 € 15/9 (15-18; 19-22) € 20/10 (day ticket)