Emil Hrvatin

theatre of Memory


Lead1: None of the arts depends so much on memory as theatre does. Memory is what constitues theatre. Memory is the u-topian site of the theatre

Lead2: through being interactive, through his methodology of the weblike connection, and the openness of his project to current superstructures (update & upgrade), from the Renaissance perspective anticipated the Internet

the remnants of a performance are the sings of its disintegration. the performance falls apart into pieces of memory dispersed among its protagonists and the witnesses of its occurrence. this happens already during the performance itself, as Kurosawa's Rashomon shows on another level, and as Richard Schechner, who dedicated most of his theatrical projects to the depassivisation of the spectator, confirms with his hypothesis about the "selective inattention" of the spectators. Sophie Calle, in her project Dislocations (1991), asked the staff of the Museum of Modern Art in New York to describe Magritte's painting the Menaced Assassin, which was not there at the moment. One of them (a guard) could remember only "men in black suits" and several "drops of red blood." Another one (a preservationist) could only say a few words regarding the style or the subject of the painting, but described its dimensions, the condition the colours were in, and the quality of the frame with no hesitation whatsoever. None of the arts depends so much on memory as theatre does. Memory is what constitutes theatre. Memory is the u-topian site of the theatre, the place that is not there, and without which the theatre simply does not exist.

1. Giulio Camillo Delmini's project the theatre of Memory was finally realised in Milan in 1544. It is a wooden installation of amphitheatrical shape in which the roles of the auditorium and stage are inverted, in which there is hardly enough space for two bodies and in which the "performance" consists of drawers arranged like steps. this is more or less all that the historical sources meticulously analysed in contemporary historiographic literature can tell us about the unusual, paradoxically entitled project of the Italian polyhistor Giulio Camillo, whose other surname, Delminio, points to his Croatian origins (Delminium is the ancient name of what is now Tomislavgrad, from where Camillo's father moved to Friuli). Camillo left behind a booklet the Idea of theatre, in which he hermetically (his studies are strongly influenced by the Italian Neoplatonists, especially Pico della Mirandola) explained the structure and the content of the theatre of Memory, completely ignoring the description of its materialisation. the scope of Camillo's project the theatre of Memory was to store all knowledge about the Universe in one place. As such, it can be incorporated into the tradition of archives keeping and systematisation of knowledge from the Library of Babel to the French Encyclopaedists and to the scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, who are developing the idea of "the final book", a virtual library that would contain all the titles printed. But Camillo's project really derives from another tradition, the tradition of the art of memory. the art of memory is a common name for various mnemonic techniques used by the ancient rhetoricians and later orators until the invention of the press, when the need to memorise large chunks of texts disappears. the essence of the art of memory is to link the texts or the subjects of speeches to visual motifs. Visual icons help in memorising texts. Until the Renaissance, these visual motifs were some existing objects, streets of a town, windows or doors of buildings... Camillo, appearing when the art of memory was already dying (the press had already been invented), inverts the text - image relation, and creates a special place (theatre), with a special iconography (among the painters who designed the theatre of Memory the name of Tizian is also mentioned), and with special manner of linking images to the texts. No more is it a question of memorising a text through linking it to the known, existing objects; we enter the space in which visual motifs stimulate our associative mechanisms. However, what is essential for Camillo's theatre and what makes him our contemporary is the relation between the visual and other information stored in his theatre. Entering Camillo's theatre of Memory we come across the structure of seven columns with seven rows, i.e. 49 subject fields, 49 subject windows/drawers. At first glance, these windows/drawers are identical to library catalogues: each piece of information leads to a specified, unique place (to the book). Camillo's theatre works in a more complex way, since the subject fields are cross-referenced, so the piece of information, the visual motif, the fragment we find in a specific drawer is not only a reflexive stimulus to memory, but also a guide to other subject fields, other drawers, from where it is again possible to go into yet another field and so ad infinitum. When entering the fields of the theatre of Memory, we create an interactive web of knowledge, the final shape of which is completely in our hands. We can use the theatre of Memory as an entertaining pastime, as a hermetic and mystical view of the Universe, or as a way of a creative use of memory. through being interactive, through his methodology of the weblike connection, and the openness of his project to current superstructures (update & upgrade), from the Renaissance perspective anticipated the Internet, the web of webs, an unordered space flooded with enormous amount of information, which, however, has a potential for global open archives, universal virtual library.

2. the history of theatre has overlooked Camillo completely, although the name of the theatre of Memory itself is paradoxical enough to arouse at least a theoretical interest. He is treated at best as one of the followers of Vitruvian amphitheatrical architecture. In one of the few preserved records that evoke the theatre of Memory, a letter to Erasmus of Rotterdam, Viglius Zuichemus writes about the striking way in which the theatre of Memory works, and which lead Camillo to call his project a theatre: "He (Camillo) pretends that all things that the human mind can conceive and which we cannot see with the corporeal eye, after being collected together by diligent meditation may be expressed by certain corporeal sings in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eye everything that is other wise hidden in the depths of the human mind. And it is because of this corporeal looking that he calls it a theatre." (Yates, 137) corporeal looking In the aesthetic sense, Camillo's project is the forerunner of the intersection of the total stage space (constructed ambiental theatre) and verbal pictorial installations (the projects of Joseph Kosuth, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer). the effect of the theatre of Memory was, of course, manual, but the methodology of thought incorporated into Camillo's theatre warns that it was so because of the limited technological level. Two contemporary artistic views see the theatre of Memory as a machine or at least a mechanism, a kinetic installation. In the early eighties, for the Biennale in Venice, Daniel Libeskind made three machines crucial for architecture: the reading machine, the memory machine, and the writing machine. the memory machine is an attempt to transfer the way in which the theatre of Memory works. Libeskind decided to reveal to the spectator the machinery of the theatre itself, which is otherwise hidden, and without which theatre cannot function, making thus a simple installation in which the inscriptions and icons of memory move and change like puppets on a string. Carlos Fuentes, Mexican Nobel prize winner, in his major novel Terra Nostra (1975) speaks of an enclosed marble space to which nobody is admitted (somewhat similar to the library in Umberto Eco's novel the Name of the Rose, published some years later). Only Camillo knew the secret of "how he lights the theatre, how he projects, composes, or raises from nowhere those moving images to the screens and railings, what the ropes he moves and buttons he pushes mean." (Fuentes, II, 87) the next step, after Fuentes' and Libeskind's, apart from the demystification of the effect of the theatre of Memory, would be the virtualisation of these two machines. the entry into Camillo's theatre of Memory is in fact a self-referential path into our own memory.

3. What does the hypothesis that Camillo's idea was to make the human mind a universal library, an encyclopaedia of knowledge to be activated by the theatre of memory as a reminder, as a way of operating, really mean It is by no means true that Camillo's scope was to create hypermnemonic beings, that he would have seen the realisation of his project in people memorising whole books. Since the invention of the press, and particularly with the development of new communications technologies, the human mind has been becoming the master, the supervisor of knowledge; to recognize the texts, to know how to get to them and how to use them in a creative manner is more important than to memorise them. Camillo is the topographer / cartographer of memory. the imperative of today is not to "memorise" in cathegories, but to be able to locate the segments of memory - herein lies Camillo's modernity: "Memory not as something passive, as, so to speak, bumping into objects placed in the immersive surroundings, but as an activity that engages and builds the time pattern that enables the experience of the past (as a story for the present). Because the past as something bygone simply does not exist in art, and particularly in electronic, cybernetic art." (Strehovec, 9) Fuentes added a poetic dimension to Camillo's amazing character. Fuentes' Camillo wants to know what to do with memory, how could it be of any use to us. Fuentes stratifies memory, putting, through Camillo's mouth, in the first place the memory of events that never happened, but could have happened. this is the most perfect of memories: "the images of my theatre include all the possibilities of the past, but represent also all the possibilities of the future, because if we know that which never occurred, we will know what yearns to come into being at all costs... History repeats itself only because we are not aware of the other possibility of every historical event... And if we knew history, we could prevent its repeating." (Fuentes, II, 85)

4. Every utopia has its productive dimension. U-topia is not to be reached, to be realised - the great paradox of Lewis Carroll: working on the map of Great Britain which was to comprise every object on the ground, the cartographers were obliged to work in ever smaller scale, until they came to the scale of 1:1, i.e. that the ideal map of Great Britain is Great Britain itself. the object itself is already its own ideal representation. U-topia is there to generate the desire, to make it persistent. U-topia is always a process, never the result.

5. Camillo's theatre of Memory is the object anticipating the Renaissance image of contemporary art, in which there are no boundaries among arts, in which cultures are intertwined vertically (pop-elite-ethno) and horizontally (interculturalism), in which art is linked to sciences, the media, social practices.

Works cited: Lina BOLZONI, Il teatro della memoria. Studi su Giuliano Camillo, Liviana, Padova, 1984 Giulio CAMILLO, L'idea del teatro, Sellerio editore, Palermo 1991 Carlos FUENTES, Terra Nostra, I-II, Državna založba Slovenije, Ljubljana 1991 Daniel LIBESKIND, Counterdesign Janez STREHOVEC, "V znamenju Total Recall," Maska, 4-6, 1997 Mario TURELLO, Anima Artificiale. Il Teatro magico di Giulio Camillo, Aviani editore, Udine 1993 Frances YATES, the Art of Memory, Pimlico, London 1992

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