- Site-specific cases
In what ways can memory help in empowering civic activities, triggering collective motives and actions? How can the curation of memory be a transformable, playable and mobile performance?
Memory Box is a project seeking answers to these questions. To reveal the process of how civic empowerment operated, a remembering action is simulated to make collective memories visible. Memory Box, as a public installation, is the outcome to reveal narratives behind collective action through reading collective memory. It is based on remembering the transformation process of the cultural center located in Güzelyalı neighborhood of Izmir, Turkey. The memories referring the civic initiation about the transformation of ' As Movie Theatre ' of the 80s into a cultural center were emphasized and made visible via the ‘Memory Box’ located in the public space next to the center. The components of this process are exhibited at K2 Contemporary Art Center in Izmir to meet with the rest of the Izmir siders.
Designed as a mobile installation system, video obtained from the oral history study was projected over the box's inner surface, whereas its outer skins formed backgrounds to record voices and shoot new stories.
Visitors approach the Memory Box through present voices in the park, enter the box and start to hear the sounds of the past. The video inside the box starts with the history of As Movie Theatre and informs the visitors about the transformation period of the building in accordance with certain themes.
The screening of the video and the process of recording stories simultaneously took place on the inner and the outer skins of Memory Box constructed out of OSB panels.
Image from the Exhibition.
In contrast to the memories performed inside the box during the public event in the neighborhood, the memories were intentionally displayed elsewhere than the box and were scattered around the space where the exhibition was held.
