David Toop presents: ARCHIVE BREATHING with: Elaine Mitchener – Dam van Huynh – Jason Yarde – Cathy Lane -Russell Ackerman-Callow – Andrea Zarza – Rie Nakajima
5 April Saturday – Studio Theatre – Central Saint Martins (Handyside Road entrance, off York Way), Granary Building, 1 Granary Square, N1C 4AA – 19.30 – free admission
What is an archive? Is an archive a place where memories lie sleeping, a nursing home for ghosts, an empty room of creaking floors? Is all of the anxiety invested in archival preservation just a death duty paid to unfulfilled life? Trash on the streets; a prehistoric forest exposed as a beach is washed away by rain; the clatter of wooden machinery; fragments of old music becoming new music; a recording of place in one moment heard in another place, in another moment; the scent of herbs recalling the passing of ancestors: are they all archival objects? History as defined by the victors – how can those archives be opened and turned until they breathe? How can the archive be a living entity? Without words or matter, where does the archive exist? Where, if anywhere, is the site of truth within the archive?
. . . not a talk or lecture, or a concert or dance performance, or a symposium or seminar, not a narrative or a drama . . . in that case, what . .