Museum of Nonconformist Art. St. Petersburg (RU). 2016

Walking into Forgetting is an immersive performance lecture in which my text 'Forgetting as Activism' is presented in tandem with a reading and retelling of Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

The piece begins with a performer in the role of the lecturer, embodied split in two forms - the physical or actual (lying on the ground at the museum entrance) and the virtual (video image projection at the lecture site). The event begins with an image and text projection, with all revealing signifiers removed from the text. As the words play out, the virtual performer falls apart and disappears from the image. Her physical counterpart slowly crawls from the museum entrance into the lecture site, on her back, with eyes closed, under the chairs and through them. Gradually joined by invisible performers (who have been anonymous among the audience), she breaks open the space between the chairs, knocking them down, rearranging them with and without people seated on them. Using the body and not words, the performers subvert the symbolic structures and common modes of meaning production—violence into love, falling into floating, destruction into creation, chaos into harmony, power into vulnerability, bodies seem to touch and collide but do not. 

The piece ends with the final question of Plato’s cave - would the prisoners kill the liberated one who returned to try to awaken them? I choose to leave this open ended. We often have an idea that if we liberate someone we are doing something good for them, but with freedom comes responsibility, fear and uncertainty, and this is not always desired, even if it brings one into truth. Many would knowingly (and perhaps wisely) choose the illusion. Where does this leave us?

Concept, Artistic Direction, Choreography: Grace Euna Kim
Performers: Vitaly Kim, Alena Chiklina, Katarina Maran 
Voice: Yaroslava Zakharova
Camera: Anastasia Patsey