Do you know a place that doesn't exist anymore?

Do you know a place that doesn’t exist anymore? is a participatory performance that tackles the concept of impermanence of space. It is an invitation to take the risk of remembering and pay tribute to places gone and corners from the past. This participatory performance tackles the concept of impermanence of space and the inevitable fact that all places get altered or will one day disappear. It also invites the audience members to reflect about their own memory of places and revisit the past.

The audience members enter a space where they are free to walk wherever they want. The space is empty apart from four stations: the “Planning Table”, the “Box”, the “Memory Archive”, and an elevated desk of a performer editing a digital plan, projected on a screen. People are invited to share a place from their memory that doesn’t exist anymore, that they miss or that they would like to revisit, by drawing a plan of it at the planning table, then putting it in the box. They are free to decide to participate actively or to simply watch. Throughout the performance, “builder performers” attempt to recreate the shared places, by using ordinary objects and furniture. The number of objects being limited, the performers have to use the same objects for multiple places. Therefore, some places overlap, and the setup of the space itself is constantly changing. At one point during this process, the performers invite some audience members to help them build places, if they wish to join.

At the “Memory Archive”, people have the possibility to share thoughts or memories they have about places that don’t exist anymore. The “archivist performer” organizes these notes into a three-dimensional map, finding what connects all these places. During the performance, the performer at the desk is tracking all the changes in the space, adding, moving and removing objects in her plan. She is keeping track of the changes inthis constantly changing landscape, trying to conserve the memory of its brief existence, before it disappears with the end of the performance.

About the collective
The project was initiated by Mara Ingea (LB), and developed with Susana Botero Santos (CO), En Ping Yu (TW), Kirstine Hupfeldt Nielsen (DK) and Daniel Victoria Reyes (MX).