Two artists come into possession of a big collection of photo slides. Its author was born in Java in a Dutch family with a high status. In his adult life, as husband, father and important employee of a respected company, he decided to create his own collection of memories. During over 50 years he captured trips, visits in museums, family and business meetings and growing up of his children. After his death the pictures were given over to the artists by one of his sons. Slowly they become more and more silent. The captured stories vanish from the memory of those closest to him and the archive becomes more and more prone to various interpretations. The price that has to be paid for the artistic freedom in reading them are the meanings written there by the creator himself.
The starting point for the performance by Turkowski & Nowacka, an artistic duo, who reach for the archive materials not for the first time in their work and use the tools of the documentary theatre, is a record of the journey through the collection of memories, places and times. Gradually the Dutch collection starts mingling with the collections of the artists families, Netherlands with Poland, Indonesia with France, present with colonial times, all the way to the prehistory and one of the oldest images made by a representative of the species homo sapiens.
The shell, on which apparently one of the ‚upright humans’ engraved some geometrical patterns around 500 000 years ago, becomes the starting point for collecting further stories about capturing ones own experience or the world around us on carriers more durable then life of an individual human. Sometimes the very gesture of a human made centuries ago, 50 years ago or quite recently is more interesting then the preserved content of the memory. The performance “collection of” is a story about different attempts to save one’s experience, about reading the signs from the past and creating one’s own stories on this basis. The work on reading the collections never ends after all and the archives and images from the past gain more and more surprising meanings.
Reading Group
Feel free to join Turkowski & Nowacka’s Reading Group on May 27 from 19:30 to 22:00 in Savannah Bay.
Interview
Annika Hilger, SPRING Academy trainee, interviewed Turkowski & Nowacka about the process of making collection of and a few themes from the performance. Read the interview here.
Reports
“The photo story performances seem to be about identity: who am I as a person? What do cultural differences say about your identity?”
– Floris van den Berg, SPRING reporter
“Each generation grows up with its own story and seeks its roots. Where do I come from? Where am I going? A collection can give meaning, keep stories alive, and sometimes even change the shared history….”
– Leonie de Groot, SPRING reporter
