Theatre Lecturers Jules Dorey Richmond & David Richmond have exhibited their work ‘Personal Archive #1’ at York St John University as part of the International ‘Cultures of Memory Symposium II‘. (8th – 11th October) Here they talk about the reasons behind opening up their personal archive:
We have often claimed that our work occupies the space that lies in the void and the nexus between fine art (the object) and performance (the living body). This work-in-progress is offered as a furthering of a conversation, which began at last years Cultures of Memory Symposium and is conceived in response to a constellation of events:
In an after show discussion we were thanked for opening-up our personal archive, which immediately excited us as we had not thought about our work in this way before.
In October 2013 we journeyed to Zagreb to the Museum of Broken Relationships and wondered what a museum of unbroken relationships would look like.
This is the first step of our collaborative practice-led PhD. We are interested in the small, everyday detritus of life and the various memories and associations that these simple objects invoke. Whilst agreeing with Kuhn when she asserts that, ‘[T]elling stories about the past, our past, is a key moment in the making of ourselves,[1] we are aware that this idea is problematised within embedded lives. Lives in which time lived together out-weighs time lived apart. Slippages and gaps of memory provoke doubt, contestation, frustration, and, an unsettling feeling of an unknowable and unstable sense of the past and the present