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memoir I: virtual/in-person, interactive installation, by Amy Stacey Curtis
The 3rd iteration of memoir I will be presented 2023 or 2024, virtually or in person.
To Participate From Home
Think of single, personal memory occurring at any point from your birth year (as early as 1923) to present year.
Send up to 9 memories to [email protected], subject: "for memoir." Please type up to 9 memories---each from a different year---in body of email. Memories can be simple or descriptive, each up to 200 words, but should not include names, nor include specific months/days. Above each memory, type the year in which the remembered event took place. If you wrote memories in memoir I's books during previous installations or performances, it's ok to add up to 9 more. For each anonymous memory you're comfortable having Curtis read out loud during virtual performance, indicate "ok to read" just after the memory, or indicate "ok to read all."
During memoir I's performance, Curtis will act as realtime scribe for participants' memories (performance streamed live; links to be provided). Curtis will sit at a white, scribe's desk in front of a row of free-standing bookshelves holding 99 books, each numbered with a year (collective books spanning 99 years from 1923 to 2021). On each participant's behalf, Curtis will write each memory anonymously in each year's corresponding book, reading aloud those memories participants have given Curtis permission to read (also anonymously).
During in-person installations of memoir I, participants write their own memories in each of 9 different books, different years.
More About memoir
memoir is Curtis's first ongoing, interactive work meant to archive and share collective memory from 1918 through up to 2069. The first installment of memoir was at Curtis's 9th solo-biennial exhibit MEMORY (Bates Mill, Lewiston, Maine, 2016), during a time when participants could gather to write memories themselves. At MEMORY, memoir's 99 books' spanned "1918" to "2016" and were presented with 99, white desks, chairs and pencils.
A book is "complete" once it contains 300 memories. Books are also "complete" once they fall outside the respective 99-year span. memoir---in its entirety---is complete once 99 books hold 29,700 memories within any single exhibit's 99-year span, or at the end of 2069, the year of Curtis 99th birthday, whichever comes first.
Starting with the first 99-year span in which there is at least 1 memory in all 99 books, Curtis will begin publishing chap- and e-books, each edition comprising a single memory from each of the respective span's 99 years.
Curtis's intention has been to present memoir every 1-to-3 years in various U.S. spaces from abandoned, to interactive-installation-friendly, non-profits. Because of her illness, plans to install memoir at full-scale in 2018 were cancelled. Then, hoping to mount her full installation in 2020, she came to this other way to present the large interactive work after lockdown began.
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