WILDWORKS presents THE MEMORY PROJECTOR

24th 25th 26th 27th September 2009

Glows with a concern and intensity that invites us to see the familiar city differently. The Scotsman

In September 2009 a team of 10 WildWorkers together with 8 local artists and performers took up residence in Glasgow to create an interactive performance and installation that would be the centre piece of the Merchant City Festival.

For three weeks we had a small film crew travelling around Glasgow, interviewing people in their homes, visiting markets and community centres, recording the spirit of the city. We also gathered family albums, home movies and archive footage. We edited the vast quantities of material into a series of short films that attempted to replicate, in some way, the grammar of memory.

We worked in the vast basement of the old Fruit Market, now partly occupied by a wonderfully Lynchean nightclub but mostly a subterranean maze of pipes, ducts, hazard lights and fire doors.

In this unlikely locale we created an underworld of memory and forgetting, populated by amnesiac staff who enlisted the audience in a quest to find the Engine Rooms of Memory, where the memory of the city is gathered, archived and projected.

When audience members finally reached their destination they were invited to gaze into the pool of memory, where images, music and speech were projected in an ever changing collage of everyday life, childhood, work, street life: a celebration of the city in the memory of its people.

The exit was through the labyrinth of memory, the vast collection of memory labels gathered by WILDWORKS over the past four years: What does your heart want to remember? We now have quite a few answers from the people of Glasgow. 

WILDWORKS: MEMORY PROJECTOR is supported by Homecoming Scotland.
For more full festival details visit www.merchantcityfestival.com