My Mother’s Taught Me
]perfomance s p a c e[
Documentation by Matt Mahony
My Mother’s Taught Me was a durational performance that was created in a venture to display the phenomenological echoing with both individual and collective memory. It centres on remembering as a practise and tool to undo the ruptures in our understandings of personal experiential events. The piece puts an emphasis on how the recapitulation of movement and sounds interrelating can be a sensory vehicle to delve through the lost compartments of our ontology. Its aim is to approach recollection as means of an ongoing and arduous practice where we form new or lost selves through returning to our memories and cultural/vestigial history.
This sense of returning was done by jogging from ]performance s p a c e[‘s gallery to Sandgate which involved carrying a cardboard box sourced from a local Afro-Caribbean food shop whereby the box was then used to store dominoes in. Dominoes is played with a particular modality in Caribbean culture, it is slammed down with force on tables filled with close and distant relatives as laughter impedes the amplification of sound emitting from the dominoes. This sound heard in childhood was then attempted in the performance as I ran to the coast of Folkestone. The sea acted as a specific element for the invocation of collective memory.