Philadelphia, PA
June 25, 2016
Music in collaboration with Billy Dufala
Songs of Memory and Forgetting was a site-specific performance at Revolution Recovery, a construction-waste recycling facility in Northeast Philadelphia. As artist in residence, I spent six months sifting through the mountains of rubble to collect personal items that arrived from house clean outs, often after an elderly person died or moved into a care home. The performance took audiences on an intimate song tour of the site, navigating the sorting piles to explore the fragile nature of memory. I collaborated with RAIR co-founder Billy Dufala on the music, which we performed on instruments found in the dump. Inspired by the collecting and sorting done on a massive scale by excavators and front-end loaders, I activated objects made from thousands of photos and garments rescued from the dump.
The project was supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Photos by Ryan Collerd
Video by Greenhouse Media
