Scenography derived from the performance Artefacto de memoria (Artifact of memory)

Artefacto de memoria was performed at LABoral Centro de Arte in February 2021, together with the musical creation of Sara Muñiz and the visual creation of Irene Pis. The work refers to stories linked to the author’s family memory.

The typewriter was the object used to narrate how, during the Civil War, her grandfather was forced to type up orders to be shot in a concentration camp. The then young man took advantage of moments of solitude to eat some of those orders. The white shirts refer to those people who perhaps never knew they were released from a murder that was never typed. The piano, another object recovered from familiar spaces, places the whole narrative in a very different place, the present, and invites the audience of the theatre piece Artefacto de memoria to practice the initial exercise of this whole process, listening. During her artistic residency Ana Izarzugaza sought to transform the narrative and the objects that formed the backbone of the play into a textile translation.

In this process, the artist recovered both disused materials and others loaded with memory. Using her grandmother’s old sewing machine, with the help of her mother, she turned the very process of creation into an experience of recovering memory, no longer oral as it was at first, but manual.

“Because it is affective and magical, memory is only accommodated by details that comfort it.”
Pierre Nora.