Songs of Memory and Forgetting

Songs of Memory and Forgetting
RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency)— Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
June 25, 2016

Music in collaboration with Billy Dufala

Songs of Memory and Forgetting was a site-specific performance at Revolution Recovery, a construction-waste recycling facility in Northeast Philadelphia that hosts RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency). As RAIR’s performance fellow, I spent six months sifting through the mountains of rubble to collect personal items that arrived from house clean outs, often after an elderly person died or moved into a care home. The performance took audiences on an intimate song tour of the site, navigating the sorting piles to explore the fragile nature of memory. I collaborated with RAIR co-founder Billy Dufala on the music, which we performed on instruments found in the dump. Inspired by the collecting and sorting done on a massive scale by excavators and front-end loaders, I activated objects made from thousands of photos and garments rescued from the dump.

The project was supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

Photos by Ryan Collerd
Video by Greenhouse Media