Locations of Memory: Bridging the Gap between Private and Public Memory in Location Performance and Theater Mitu's Hamlet / Ur-Hamlet

Abstract

Understanding memory as what we are made of or what we really are associates the concept of memory with that of history, subjectivity and place. Like subjectivity, memory "means different things and is understood in different ways in different places" (Radstone / Hodgkin, 2003: 2). In their anthology Regimes of Memory, Radstone and Hodgkin note that contemporary studies of memory focus more on historical, social, cultural and popular memory than on individual memory. This contrasts with previous memory studies, where memory is understood as "the refuge of the individual and where the relationship between individual and public memory appeared overloaded (ibid.). Radstone and Hodgkin add: "The difficulties of memory are therefore associated with the question of how the separation between the "private" inside and the "public" outside of memory can be overcome" (ibid.). This separation is related to the way in which the social individual is conceptualised. If it is understood as a relevant history archive, individual memory will count as something more than a personal phenomenon. This perspective has been important to the Theatre of Reality for its use and questioning of testimony. Artists of theatre and installation art have continued to take into account that what memory and history produce, in the words of Radstone and Hodgkin, is "also contingent upon the (contestable) systems of knowledge and power that produced them" (ibid. 11). The three works discussed here - The Circuit, The Heidelberg Project, and Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet - are among the many works that address and critique epistemologies of memory by freely mixing their sources in provocative ways.