In a country where longing for the past bespeaks a dominant cultural trope - saudade, fado and the long wait for The Desired, D. Sebastian of Portugal are examples of this – the performance My Room / My Rum, premiered at the Condomínio Festival, in Lisbon, explores and further unsettles the dynamic between memory and identity. Accordingly, collecting and archiving as necessary means to assert identity are subject to evaluation. It turns out that they both prove ineffective at spotting one’s place in the world, merely disclosing loose traces of life experiences instead. It is fragmentary, achronological and, altogether, unsatisfying. Seemingly, the Portuguese, still dwelling on the implications of overseas expansion and colonial dominance,
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Yet, the narrative structuring the performance, although about a woman, is in the third person, not in the first. It is about a ‘she,’ not an ‘I’. This unfolds as a strategy to evoke a ‘we.’ The subject of the narrative is threefold: identity, memory and archiving. There was this woman who collected postcards with the goal of finding out more about herself, namely if she preferred to leave or come back. The increasing number of postcards in her collection corresponded to a decreased number of memories. While she lost memories, she acquired scattered traces of her life that gradually inhabited her intimacy and made her more self-aware. As the past and the present overlapped, memory …show more content…
The effect was different from the announced. I was not at rest, instead I felt weary and uncanny, as my mind relentlessly shifted from my own memoirs to the global events that frame us all. The ‘we’ imposes on the audience/ collaborator. In effect, lying in bed, getting cosy and even ready to fall asleep was just what it took to break with the world outside “my room,” namely with the chronological alignment of events. It is as the woman said, just before leaving the room: “Leave everything behind, leave nothing unsaid, for the moment ahead is already
Yet, the narrative structuring the performance, although about a woman, is in the third person, not in the first. It is about a ‘she,’ not an ‘I’. This unfolds as a strategy to evoke a ‘we.’ The subject of the narrative is threefold: identity, memory and archiving. There was this woman who collected postcards with the goal of finding out more about herself, namely if she preferred to leave or come back. The increasing number of postcards in her collection corresponded to a decreased number of memories. While she lost memories, she acquired scattered traces of her life that gradually inhabited her intimacy and made her more self-aware. As the past and the present overlapped, memory …show more content…
The effect was different from the announced. I was not at rest, instead I felt weary and uncanny, as my mind relentlessly shifted from my own memoirs to the global events that frame us all. The ‘we’ imposes on the audience/ collaborator. In effect, lying in bed, getting cosy and even ready to fall asleep was just what it took to break with the world outside “my room,” namely with the chronological alignment of events. It is as the woman said, just before leaving the room: “Leave everything behind, leave nothing unsaid, for the moment ahead is already