About the salt, the bitter, the forbidden and the sweet
in co-authorship with Memory Lab Collective and the participants of the Bluebeard performance

2023

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Overview:

About the salt, the bitter, the forbidden and the sweet is an attempt to put into words a dream I had, which emerged alongside the formation of Memory Lab, a collective of women working with performative practices, video, text, and intuitive research, founded in Ukraine in the summer of 2023. The images stem from the residency (both online and offline) that preceded the performance Bluebeard, where a group of women from different regions of Ukraine worked together, exploring their individual histories while simultaneously tracing a map of the collective historical memory of this territory.

The text, created at the invitation of curator Maya Hayda, is part of the platform Internodes, where the artist researches and brings together different collectives and initiatives from Ukraine working with the concept of kinship.

About the salt, the bitter, the forbidden and the sweet

One of my favorite poems by Louise Glück, “The seven ages” begins by reciting a dream, a dream in which the world appears in its most primitive, tactile form.

In my first dream the word appeared
the salt, the bitter, the forbidden and the sweet
Then, comes the descent, towards a raw world
where the earth is peeled,
the fields fill plates or cause noisy guts and empty spoons.
I hid in the groves,
I worked in the fields until the fields were bare-

The salt, the bitter, the forbidden, and the sweet could also be part of the ingredients for a collective meal. The same meal we have been preparing during our weeks of living together as a group, as MemoryLab in the town of Verkhnii Verbizh, in the western part of Ukraine. The same food that is named, that is intuited in several of the monologues of our searches into the past.

[...] The taste comes first
[...] I prefer cuticles. I eat my dead skin, like an insect
[...] Their mouths clung to each other like organs
[...] I swallow a piece of the goose and spit it out

After some time working with each others’ stories, we realize that memory is a living organism. Sometimes it is like a dense mass that you can form into a dough. Sometimes it is like an abyss that you can round out the edges of, where you can get dizzy, but you hold on to the brink and your body stretches, becomes the edge, becomes like dough, taking on the imprint of the landscape.

We call ourselves MemoryLab. We think about the past, we work with it, and, at the same time, we are creators of new memories that are interlaced, sometimes polished, sometimes muddy.

Earth was given to me in a dream
In a dream I possessed it

If we think of memory as this mass of dough, it begins possibilities and invites us to work with it through experimentation, imagination, as well as responsibility.

The word responsibility is round. Like stories we tell again and again with their beginnings and their ends. Like plates, deep or flat in their, but round in their periphery. It is no coincidence that Donna Haraway halved the word “responsibility” like a watermelon, resulting in a new term as: response-ability (having the ability to respond to something).

Working with the past, we realize the importance of collective experiences in making our bodies connectors rather than capsules. The importance in having the response-ability of recognizing ourselves in our features, finding attunement between bodies of human and non-human beings. Working through the past with response-ability, we are together learning to live in a wounded present.

About the gray, the red, the black and the white

Once I read another poem called “The edge.” The author, Gloria Fuertes, wrote it in a post war time. I didn't understand, I was a “kid,” I forgot what was said, and I kept living my life as if nothing happened. Then, some years later I had a very significant dream about color theory. The dream occurred while we were in the middle of our first collective project as MemoryLab, the Blue Beard play.

Recently, this poem came back to me and I understood it as well as what my dream was about. I understood what the edge was. We were there. We touched it, we contained it. Like for those poets, something was given to “us”, and in a dream “we” possessed it.

Everything I am saying to you right now is meaningless, unless you give me the chance to guide you through the point I am heading towards that is still unknown, even for me. I tried, in writing this, to construct the sentences, to organize my speech effectively – telling myself each word should have a meaning, each meaning its own root.

But then I remembered that the memory, as well as this text, as well as the dreams, the poems, and the poets on “the edges of something” are imprecise beings. And, as beings, have their own rules and rights to exist as they want. So I took this quite seriously and decided to keep writing as a dough that expands.

Before I was talking about the taste, the texture, now, let me talk to you about the colors that I once dreamed of.
In the beginning I called it “Color theory of acting”. But now I see that it goes beyond. Now I see that this dream is about all the stages that we’ve been through as a collective.
So let me guide you among these four stages, just as in my dream, just as in my monologue,

[...] -hold my hand, I beg you. I am afraid of the words-.

First, goes the gray (or the salt). A flat plate, still empty. Still round. Just as it is. It is the first approach. The intention. I look around and see: I am a round. I don´t rush, I am fearless but awake in my first step to look deeper. To touch deeper. To become deeper. But I don´t rush. I am gray, the salt, something stable.

Then goes the red, (or the bitter) where I am human, where I beg to descend. I look into the abyss, I am the abyss, I rush, I smell, I taste, and it's burning, my mouth is burning. It is the pure experimentation, the ability to respond. It is the affection, the affectation.

As you see I stay attached to the poets, because through others' voices, it is easier to find a path, to keep the way, to bend the knee.

Then follows the black, the forbidden. I don't know what to add here, because the black is the perfect scenario. It is the exact moment before the play starts and ends. The lights turn off. It is the moment when we close our eyes before sleep, before a long breath. It is the “before and after of everything.” The raw one. The blind sound. The empty space, ready to be filled.

At the end, comes the white. And in my dream, I didn't see this as a color in its totalness, it was more about the sparks. The sparks in the dark. The kindling. In my dream, those sparks of light are the only things that persist above all. They illuminate the space, the abyss, the past, the edges, and the wounded present. It is the lightning path where everybody tries to find the right words to explain something that has been missing. It is something that cannot be possessed, cannot be contained.

It is given,
Given with care as a meal when it is shared.