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Surviving Objects

Murjas, T. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1280-7149 (2012) Surviving Objects. [Performance]

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Official URL: http://www.reading.ac.uk/ftt/research/ftt-survivin...

Abstract/Summary

Surviving Objects (2012) is a devised multi-media practice-as-research performance based on extensive interviews conducted with my elderly mother and recorded on a hand-held device. Our conversations concern her experiences as a child refugee following violent deportation by the Soviet Army from Eastern Poland to Siberia (1941), and her subsequent route, via Persia, to a British-run refugee camp in Northern Rhodesia, where she remained for 6 years before arriving in the UK. In order to aid my mother’s reflections, our recorded conversations focus on the objects remaining from that period in her life – my ‘inheritance’. The material presence of this handful of objects is central to the ninety-minute performance. Surviving Objects constitutes my attempt to locate a theatrical form through which to root/re-route this engagement with my mother’s marginalised voice. The end-on performance haptically navigates themes of intimacy and failing memory – navigates, indeed, my constantly shifting relationship with my mother. It searches for new cross-medial pathways along which her experience, and my experience of her, can play-out. Surviving Objects involves: 1. live performance (two silent female actors handling/presenting my mother’s objects); 2. Film (two synchronously-playing, large-scale projections exploring the objects by means of a highly-magnifying macro lens); 3. Pre-recorded sound (my mother’s voice, taken from our recorded interviews, which were conducted in Polish, with my own verbal contribution meticulously editorially excised from those conversations); 4. My translation of her stories (appearing periodically as written text that ‘overlays’ - rather than sub- or surtitles - the projected imagery).

Item Type:Performance
Divisions:Arts, Humanities and Social Science > Institute of Education > Language and Literacy in Education
Interdisciplinary centres and themes > Research Centre for Evacuee and War Child Studies (ResCEW)
Arts, Humanities and Social Science > Modern European Histories and Cultures
Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood (CIRCL)
Arts, Humanities and Social Science > International Study and Language Institute (ISLI)
Arts, Humanities and Social Science > Language Text and Power
Arts, Humanities and Social Science > Identities
Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Arts and Communication Design > Film, Theatre & Television
ID Code:30919

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