I CAN NO LONGER REMEMBER AND NEITHER CAN YOU

I Can No Longer Remember and Neither Can You is a two-channel installation by artists Lucca Lutzky and Juli Bierich produced during a summer residency at NeverAtHome. A meditation on memory and sound, the film unfolds in split screen. Each scene appears as a translation of the other, projected against a black void – a gap between what is heard, described, remembered. Taking Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1955 radio play Die Zikaden as a point of departure, the film features twenty participants of different ages and backgrounds who were invited to describe, imitate, or translate personal memories, then developed into abstract, performative gestures. The slipperiness of translation – between media, formats, and languages, from sound to speech to movement, individual gesture to group choreography – lies at the heart of this work. Bachmann’s play is a reimagining of a myth from Plato’s Phaedrus, of mortals who became so entranced by the first Muses’ song that they sang themselves to death. Such devotion was rewarded by being transformed into cicadas, who according to legend survive on air and song alone. An allegory for the enduring desire to lose oneself in artistic expression; the sacrifice of intimate and singular experiences to generate something shared and universal. Soon the Funkhaus will be wiped clean and repurposed, the immaterial traces of its sonic archive dispersed. When it is emptied and remade, what frequency will remain? Perhaps the accreted hum of history attempting to translate itself, flickering between the inexpressible and the spoken, thinning and thinning until there is only song, and then silence.