Mette Edvarsen, memory and living books
Mette Edvardsen: I am Mette Edvardsen, I am a performer and a choreographer based in Oslo. Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, the first time this took place was in Leuven in 2010. The beginning of Time has fallen asleep can be traced in several points. To mention of course the important one which is Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Later I have also learnt about the practice of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova who was also doing the practices on Fahrenheit 451 but in real life, where she would memorize her poems together with friends and then burning them afterwards in order to let that survive censorship and so on.
But then, there was another moment before that, which was in connection to the opening of the seed vault In Svalbard, an island in the north of Norway which hosts a collection of edible plant seeds from all over the world and it was a very extraordinary project, and it was supposed to be able to safeguard all these seeds in a vault which is built into the bedrock which is under the permafrost - is very cold – and to be able to have these samples for possible future catastrophes. There was something very interesting but also a bit fantastic about this project and also a bit in confrontation with this idea of future and how long do we understand future, how do we think that we can prepare ourselves to be able to deal with all possible catastrophes. And then, that was also connecting to a project which used that a as a reflection to think about what do we pass onto the future and what do we bring with us.
Then, thinking about the performing arts and the practices that are so ephemeral or something that we’re doing and experiencing in the moment, I thought it was interesting to think about that and to understand what the relationship is to what we are doing and to memory and how this is passed on and the relying on external technologies and where are we in that picture. And of course, working with memory is something that’s not stable at all and is something that still when we see for example the seed vault in Svalbard only ten years later, it was damaged, water was running in, the melting of the ice around was happening faster and there were problems they hadn’t thought about. So, all these kinds of big projects have also their shortcomings in some sense. But, not so much to criticize that but to also think about what is it that we are doing and that’s when Fahrenheit came in, as this idea of keep learning books by heart in order to preserve them for the future. What does that mean? What does it mean to learn a book by heart, to become a book and to try and develop that as a practice, to be engaged on the one hand, idea of memory and, you know, bringing something with; but, on the other hand, being constantly caught between memory and forgetting, that you have to practice it in order for it to actually exist and somehow this being very much the inner being of the performing arts. It’s not so much about the disappearance as it is about the commitment to doing again and again and repeating and letting it live in that way.
Through my practice, I have worked with objects, I have moved towards language, and worked with language. I think one thing that somehow stays throughout all these pieces is a certain relationship to what is being built in space and time and that, in a way, the languages or how I form language can be in different ways but this kind of approach or concern or interest is somehow the red thread that is always there.
To learn by heart is not new invention, but in this particular mode of looking at it, not so much for in our interest it has not been about acquiring information into the mind but to really engage with the process of how is that reading and what parts of us are engaged in the process. For instance, it has been really interesting to learn that understanding the content has been less important than being able to pronounce it, for example. So, things like this that you discover through doing, understanding the importance of the orality and, of course, also, that there are so many things attached to the memory. Each time repeating it you emphasize or you inscribe it a bit again, reinforcing these patterns, but you also add other memories to the memories, so I have the feeling that the book somehow gets thicker and thicker by other layers that are added on top of it.
One of the things that has been particular and very interesting for me to experience with the project is how different formats grow out of what we were doing, which was not part of the idea to start with, that I say “OK I want to do this, we will learn by heart, and we will make new additions...”. There was not a projection of what we would do. So, it’s been very much starting with this simple idea and developing that and discovering things with it. So, for instance, this writing down.
And then, when the pandemic happened and we could not do some of the things that were planned to do, I proposed to the books in the first place that we would write letters to each other. I was a little bit sad to imagine that we would do readings on the screen, like on zoom and skype and I thought it’s true that it would be practically easy to put into place, but it felt somehow wrong for the project, and because there was another possibility, the one of writing letters, which I thought could equally take place. First, we had a period where books were writing letters to each other as a way to be able to continue, to be able to work, to be able to be in touch with..., for ourselves (the memory) but, also, each other, reading each other by receiving letters in the post. Then, in a second period we also offered these readers, like we are doing here at the Reina Sofía, that people could inscribe to, and they would receive a letter from one of the books, who writes it down on paper to the person who is on the address.
I had no idea when I started this project how this would develop. It started very much like an experiment. There was a moment where I was invited to contribute to a project by another artist in Belgium, Sarah Vanhee who was doing an auction where she would sell ideas from artists that they did not realize for one reason or another. So, she asked me to contribute with one idea, so I gave her this one.
She actually sold this idea to an institution, and later this institution, STUK, in Belgium invited me to realize the work. Then, I was together with a group of six other people, so we were seven, and then, as we were developing it and starting our readings, there was this sense of curiosity towards imagining what would it be if we met again in a year or how long will it stay in our memory. Some questions started to appear: how much is it possible to memorize, some questions that now seem a bit naïf, but there were there at the moment. Then, we were given the possibility to do it in another place and somehow, I thought, “yeah, that's nice”, we can do it again and we can see where are we, how does it stay.
I thought we will do this as long is still feels like it’s something living, in the sense that it’s not a theatre piece: “this is the thing and we do this again and again”, but in this promise of continuing the practice. I had really no idea that ten years later or more, that this has grown in all these other formats and questions that really came from the work. Like, for instance: the process of the rewriting was something came up the moment that we realized that this version that we had in our memory, actually, they are quite stable if we think the fictional Fahrenheit again and imagine the sequel to the book: the dark ages are over, books are now again possible to be printed and these people who have been learning books by heart, they write them down again and new editions come out. What if we would do this? Again, in the same nature of this is the intention: we bring the version in our mind back to paper and of course, only by this process, a lot of new questions were coming up: what about punctuation, how do you place it on the page, what is a mistake, how do you correct. Many new things opened up from that process. That’s somehow the project keeps having new questions coming from different things happening.
