A Memoir of the Future
“A Memoir of the Future” took shape following the October 7 events, and is based on one chapter from the three semi-autobiographical novellas by the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, “A Memoir of the Future”: “The Dream” (1975), “The Past Presented” (1977), and “The Dawn of Oblivion” (1979).
The piece amalgamates different realms – text, theater, art exhibition, music, and a clinic – into one space. A space that is commentary on the first chapter in the novella “A Memoir of the Future,” its layers and hidden secrets, by means of:
Faithful reading of the original texts by four readers and an actor;
sound, vocals, and music;
an exhibition of objects that are carefully chosen as “archeological findings” of sorts, a mental inventory of mini-data that present a riddle, aphorism;
set and space design: a tank, womb, temple, receptacle.
Bion defined the text he wrote towards the end of his life as a “psycho-embryonic attempt to write an embryo-scientific account of a journey from birth to death.” It can be seen as a fictional psychoanalytic autobiography, both the background and the infrastructure of his conceptualizations in the field of psychoanalysis. Born in India, Bion lost his mother at a very young age, and was raised at a boarding school. During World War I he was a 19-year-old soldier, and served as a tank commander in the British Army. In World War II, he treated shell-shocked soldiers evacuated from the front line to a military hospital. Bion’s psychoanalytic thought was shaped by these events and the attempt to understand the traumas he experienced in the war.
Read verbatim, Bion’s text is a fictional dialogue between different characters and voices that merge into a manifestation of the subconscious. The fictional discussion is not registered as a unified narrative across a historical or developmental sequence, but as a conversation between a fetus, an eight-year-old, a thirty-year-old, a 42-year-old, a psychoanalyst, Leonardo da Vinci and others. The scene is in fact a simultaneous unfolding of different manifestations of the “self,” which engage in an almost delirious dialogue with one another.
At first, the text seems chaotic, but a close reading reveals its hidden logic: primary mental materials, pre-verbal images alongside transcribed materials and processed and articulated verbal expression. These exemplify the moments of trauma, in which language falls away from the body and the body encounters the horror of incomprehension.
The 45-minute-long piece – the duration of a psychoanalysis session – uses Bion’s original text as a textual space, offering it an interpretation with images, voice, music, and space design in an attempt to represent the chaotic subconscious. A part of the space is an exhibition of objects, some created especially for the event by various artists.
The outcome is a caesura, an event that oscillates between fetal stage, birth, life and death, where incomprehension is tantamount to the surplus of meanings held between the folds and layers of the text.
The piece wishes to express the sense of chaos and loss of meaning and path following the October 7th massacre; days experienced as unraveling from a stable and safe reality, and a collision with reality without the protection of language.
Transforming a collective traumatic event into a personal one.
An audience participation event.
Play Duration: 1 hour
Pre registration – Please send your full name, phone number, how many participants (up to 2), date and time to hilabh@musrara.co.il
Dramaturgical curation: Ori Drumer
Reading and acting: Avi Pnini
Readers: Avi Pnini, Zehava Yuriya, Efrat A. Kaplan
Design and lighting: Arie Berkowitz
Music and sound: Alexandre Cruz Sesper
Featured artists: Arie Berkowitz, Dalia Hai Acco, Adi Dahan, Etti Abergel, Alexandre Cruz Sesper, Jacques fhima, Michal Tamir, Ori Drumer
Text translation: Dr. Shoey Raz
Words envelope: Efrat A. Kaplan