What Persists Memory Walks 2022

01 Jul 2022 : Locations throughout The Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia

What Persists / Memory Walks is a creative research project led by artists WeiZen Ho and Alan Schacher who invited the Blue Mountains community to share their stories of place through walking and conversation. Memory Walks is part of the artists’ 2022 Research Residency project What Persists, which is supported by Critical Path Centre for Choreographic Research, based in Sydney. What is place? What is community? In What Persists we undertake investigations of place and public space through the lens of the people who inhabit and use them, wondering in parallel how place can be engendered through community. The research process was focussed towards ways of devising a social choreography based on symbols that persist in the individual’s memory, and this part is still not complete. We are interested in sculptural and object-based motifs that could augment choreographies of processional enactments. Seeking a ‘recognition’ of essences, of diverse intersecting beliefs, we were concerned about the apparent disappearance of ritual events in our lives. What elements persist in memory and still remain remarkable in our societal and domestic spaces? What symbolic practices could bring people, place and memory together? In engaging with community members we have been asking them to identify meaningful images, materials, tasks and symbols of significance. Symbolism in this sense is a medium of community, where symbolisation and ritualisation condition one another. Employing the device of going for a walk as a potent forum for exchange, we have invited community members to guide us through their environment. Whilst walking, conversations have likewise meandered and strayed, sometimes to other times and places, to memories of departed loved ones, to suicides even, and to homesickness and longing, love of nature, identification with place. Many of the walks have demonstrated an enduring and long term relationship with the place and the natural environment, with trees, views, rock and water. In The Blue Mountains walking is nothing remarkable. People come here specifically to walk. But for our partners in Kaliurang Indonesia walking has a different intent. Like Katoomba, Kaliurang is a mountainous and touristic natural region. Positioned beneath the active volcano Mount Merapi, and similarly beginning with the letter ‘K’ Kaliurang sits at 900 metres above sea level and Katoomba at 1,000 metres. There is not enough space on this webpage to share all the information, which will be added to a dedicated site.

You can read WeiZen’s perspective on the process and see further documentation here: [https://www.weizenho.com/collaborations-residencies#/what-persists/]