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Performance Research
A Journal of the Performing Arts
Volume 17, 2012 - Issue 3: On Technology & Memory
132
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Original Articles

The Signa Store: Nomadic manoeuvres in Ruby Town

Pages 63-67 | Published online: 25 Jun 2012
 

Abstract

This contribution describes a shift presented at Camillo 2.0, entitled ‘The Signa Store: Nomadic Maneuvers in Ruby Town’. The Signa Store was conceived as a form of actively remembering the subject of its presentation: the performance ‘The Ruby Town Oracle’ by the Danish/Austrian collective Signa. ‘Ruby Town’ entailed a nine days nonstop performance (Berlin 2008) in which performers resided in a real-and-fictional village. The installation consisted of twenty-two houses and military quarters, inhabited by performers for the entire length of the performance. Simultaneously, these houses provided a grid and ‘script’ for a fictional story about a community of outsiders worshipping their common ancestor Martha Rubin. The Signa Store shift started from understanding Signa's installation as a contemporary variant of Camillo's memory theatre, placing the spectator onstage, in the centre of intellectual activity and imagination. In addition, Signa's real-and-fictional village creates a collective and rhizomatic memory theatre, in which the actions, gestures and resistances of both performers and spectators are necessary to access and perform its contents, where past folds into and is transformed by lived space. Conceiving the shift itself as yet another memory theatre, the Signa Store was modeled upon the idea of an interactive storage room. Based on the confluence of two readings of the word ‘store’, namely the archive and the shop, the Signa Store provided a participatory approach to Signa's stages of living memory. This contribution describes part of the Store's inventory, and by displaying the Store's contents it portrays various ways of performing memory, listing re-enactment, tracing material archives, performative cartography and documenting-as-performance.

Notes

1 ‘Staged intimacy’, interview by the author. The quote by Arthur Koestler (item 4) derives from the same interview.

2 Matsune &Subal's Store itself is a perfect example; Rimini Protokoll uses the format of tell-selling in Call Cutta/In A Box (2006–11); Fuchs describes performance installations in which spectating borders on shopping (Fuchs Citation1996: 128–43).

3 Borges' story was first published in Los Anales de Buenos Aires (March 1946) as part of a piece called ‘Museo’.

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