2014–2019
video
Athens, 18’39”
Prague, 57’01”
Berlin, 15’50”
“How can one represent great historical moments: the rebellion of the people, the collapse of a regime, the breaking down of the borders? What stays in the memory years later: a photo, a gesture, a slogan? If you could go back in time, which role would you like to play: someone in the crowd, a speaker, a policeman?
Using a mixed format that includes both American idol and political recruitment, a jury of artists interviews the masses and make them perform in private. A durational performance with an audition format: spontaneous performers are acting in front of a camera without rehearsals; the text is written as the performers speak, and the audience is the protagonist and the spectator at the same time.” LA
Lola Arias is a multifaceted artist whose work brings together people from different backgrounds and with different historical experiences (war veterans, former communists, migrant children, etc.) in participatory theatre, film, literature, music and visual arts projects. Arias’ documentary theatre productions play with the intersection of reality and fiction. On the one hand, sitting in the theatre gives us the opportunity to engage with the joyful or disappointing narratives of others, to become entangled in their complexity. On the other hand, we can occasionally confront the incidental and fragile nature of our own individual and collective histories, as well as how changeable and unresolved our relationship is to the uncertain and dangerous machinery that is social and political history.[1]
Exhibited for the first time as a video installation at MODEM, her video triptych reconstructs the velvet revolutions of Athens in 1973 and Prague in 1989, as well as the iconic protests of the fall of the Berlin Wall, also in 1989. Speaking with people who had been present at these events 43, 30 and 26 years after they occurred, respectively, she asked the participants to recall their personal stories and re-enact these collective moments. Applicants could decide whether they wanted to be direct actors in the re-enactment of these events and, if so, what role they would like to play or whether they wished to remain spectators of the spontaneous performance. The audience is thus both spectator and protagonist in the re-enactment. The performers appear spontaneously in front of the camera, without rehearsing. They are only given the situation; the concrete text is written during the performance, so the outcome is in many ways unpredictable.
Audition for a Demonstration deals with collective memory, the mediatisation of politics and the relationship between fiction and history. Through the performative gestures of involving re-enactment, our relationship to the past changes: it is no longer something we read about in books, because when we have to perform it ourselves, when we put our bodies into the situation, our feelings about the situation change.
According to Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory model, the experiences of cultural, collective traumas, or even generations after generations of political change, are only “remembered” through the stories, images and behaviours in which members of the community have been socialised. Postmemory’s relationship with the past is thus not in fact organised by memory, but by imaginative insertion, projection and creation.[2] One might even say that the imaginative, creative operations listed above determine the act of remembering, not necessarily entirely, but inherently. Lola Arias’ project aims to stimulate thinking, to make such things possible that are not on the scale of our possibilities, because if we perceive reality in a new way, we may also create a new reality. Her situational documentary and participatory theatre, dealing with the traditions, norms and values of society, conveys experiences and knowledge that have the power to create meaning and to form reality. These interventions and performative practices result in transformations of experience and meaning that are capable reworking social trauma and change through re-evocation.
[1] see: Etchells, Tim, in: Arias, Lola: Re-enacting Life, ed. Graham-Jones, Aberystwyth, Wales, Performance Research Books, 2019, p. 47.
[2] Hirsch, Marianne: The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust, New York, Columbia University Press, 2012, pp. 106–107.