EPILOGUE

‘The moment’ in the context of performing arts is a cocktail of a perfect chemistry that is not predictable and its documentation almost impossible. ‘Moments’ are somethings to experience, to be ‘in’ and to go ‘through’. And to share them afterwards with others, to talk about their leftovers, their special resonance… Sometimes you even find yourself having a weird encounter by smiling to strangers on the way home from a performance. ‘Moments’ stay vivid, present and timeless by connecting themselves to our everyday life, our surroundings, hopes and desires. They stay alive by being shared. Due to the special times we are still in while writing this, our starting point for this performing arts project was to know that we would fail to share these very moments on the instance of their coming into being. So, we decided to appoint them as our artistic challenge, looking for new ways to share them in their aftermath and in new compositions, looking for ways to make sure they connect themselves to new encounters.

And in this very moment, we all have missed the premiere and all that the ‘visitor’ of our digital stage can do is to ceaselessly try and reconstruct ‘the moment’ from the fragments that have been left behind. This will be a futile attempt since the nature of ‘the moment’ itself defies being fixed in its documentation and the memory itself is always a construction of the past made in the present, subject to change with each moment passing. What ‘the moment’ leaves behind are only traces and those traces we invite ‘you’ to encounter and explore. Although this would be a futile attempt, it is a worthy one since only in the process of reconstruction, new moments might be generated, each with different combinations of the material and each with a unique quality.

So please choose from our fragments that attempt to encapsulate the traces of that moment in different mediums; even though this will never fully capture the moment, it will be a way of engaging with it. And in this very moment it is your turn – enjoy.

PROLOGUE

What are memories of spaces? What remains of them in memories of people, once those spaces no longer exist? If spaces impose certain ways of being and moving ‘in and around’ them, would recreating those ways of being and moving reconstitute also their memories? What happens to spaces when people are no longer present in them? What becomes of spaces when those people are absent and they are ascribed new functions?

What remains and what transforms of spaces in time and the mechanism of memory in general, as a construct always made in the present and a process that both preserves and transforms, were some of the questions and observations with which we embarked on our journey. And our guide was the concept of ‘moments’ as the smallest units in the mechanism of memory.

We selected ‘moments’ to work on from a collection of answers about the traces that places have left in people’s memories. These fragments we then shared with our collaborating artists so that they could generate words, sounds, images and movements inspired by these ‘moments’.

Our pockets already full of this, we arrived at ‘moments’ in which we started working with our costume designer, performers, assistants, technical directors in two different rehearsal spaces in two different locations, Istanbul and Dusseldorf. Memories of past and yet-to-come performances, memories of further encounters in art or public spaces, memories of fragments of movements and bodies in spaces… We shared them with each other in our own ‘third space’ as we would everyday get connected with each other. Every day, we dove freshly from the present into this pool of past and future ‘moments’ and generated new shared ‘moments’. While we were inside closed doors, we already started sharing some reflections by our posters that spoke our words in the public space to our audience with whom we were yet to meet.

During the making of this work, we did not stop attempting to meet in the moment from different locations; even when we could not hear or see, even when some of us had to unexpectedly change locations and move into our own houses. We continued even when rules and circumstances crossed out our plans and expectations. We continued working on fragments of our moments making sure that we could leave behind enough traces for our audience so that they could weave their own moments from our memories.

Marlin de Haan & Ayşe Draz