Where Our Vanished Days Secretly Gather
Performance, 30 minutes
Low-fire earthenware (no glaze), found timber
Where Our Vanished Days Secretly Gather is a performance that uses oral and material mnemonic technologies to share my mother’s experience of the 2003 Alpine Bushfires in Australia. The performance makes public what would normally be kept as private experiences with place—amplifying narratives that share the hidden violence wrought on non-human and human lives in our time of ecological breakdown.
Across two days lightning ignited eighty-seven fires, eight of these fires joined together burning approximately 20,000 square kilometres of land in the largest fire the state of Victoria has seen since the Black Friday fires of 1939. Fire is a vital part of Australian ecosystems, however, in our time of global warming, decreases in summer rain and increasing temperatures are creating conditions for fiercer and more frequent fires.
As Arundhati Roy has written, “there's really no such thing as the 'voiceless.' There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard." It is in these times of precarity and unknowing, of bodies unheard and in pain, that "the stories we tell are a social responsibility" (Sandra Cisneros).
The performance is built from interviews with my mother and father which are then transcribed and memorized using the method of loci, a mnemonic that assigns information to place through mental imagery. The objects that rest between speaker and listener are a physical mnemonic that supports the retelling of the narrative assigned in the mind. Lynne Kelly states that these technologies are often "associated with the classical orators" but more accurately have their roots in the knowledge systems of non-literate and preliterate oral cultures.
