Performance Memory Islands
by Inga Galinyte & Chloe Bellemere
A Laboratory: 100 Years of Experimentation. Annual Summer Benefit'24
Watermill Center, 2024
Artistic director Robert Wilson
Photography Maria Baranova
What sleeps inside you – she whispers. Another storm – we witness. We shake in silence and breathe in circles. We spiral into the hemispheres. The abyssal memories emerge. Listen to their shape. Re-shape. Re-play. Play. Pick up the shell, come closer. We have met before.
Memories are something we all carry with us. From the most joyful to the most traumatic, they all shape us, move us, and guide us through life, while influencing our thoughts and emotions, creating behavior patterns, and impacting our perceptions of the world, even if we no longer consciously recall them. Inspired by the abyssal creatures, mythological figures, personal and collective memories as well as the natural environment, such as oceanic landscapes, islands, and volcanos, we raise the question: How deep can we go by remembering?
Memory Islands is the artistic process by multidisciplinary artistic duo (Inga Galinyte & Chloe Bellemere) exploring the field of memory while focusing on different layers of memories, the ones we consciously keep alive and the ones we store in our unconscious memory corners.
By experiencing different art mediums, including installation, performance, text, and video art, Memory Islands has been activated at the Cité Internationale des Arts residency in Paris (2021), the Amaneï residency in Salina Island, Sicily (2023), the Watermill Center through the Artists-in-residence and the International Summer Program in New York (2023, 2024). The process of Memory Islands is supported by Goethe-Institut, Lithuanian Council for Culture, Byrd Hoffman Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding (TMU).