TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

Signs of the Times is my long-term project dedicated to commemorating the pandemic Covid 19. It started in 2021 when I got interested in seeing masks as aide mémoire – a thing helping to remember. I was collecting masks trashed (intentionally or not) in the streets of Berlin. It was like performing without an audience and giving value to abjects. I follow the theory of storied matter offered by Oppermann and Iovino, saying that every kind of matter plots a story by its existence. I was also inspired by what Karen Barad suggested, that Matter is always already an ongoing historicity (2003:206). The masks contain pandemic stories to decipher.

In the project's second stage, I involved the mask carriers and their pandemic memories, stories plotted by the matter of their bodies. 11 gatherings took place to perform the ritual of commemoration. Every participant was asked to share the most vivid pandemic memory while wearing a fresh medical mask and spoiling it with the storied matter of their bodies.

All the collected memories and masks were used in the third stage of the project trajectory. The audio recordings of the pandemic stories have been transcribed, and the masks were investigated by microbiology and genetic sequencing to discover the non-human agents of the storied matter of the masks. The stories written in human language and the discovered genomes have been used in a performative installation where I work as a contemporary scribe, writing the memories/stories repeatedly and fighting the process of their disappearance.

In my conference talk, I want to present the project trajectory, particularly the Sisyphean installation performance created during my EMAP residency at Kontejner in Zagreb. I also aim to show how the project interacts with memory studies and other theories from the so-called turn toward Matter.