Affected Stories, Sensed Memories, and Documented Voids

In this article I will refer to a one-time performance piece called ‘Remember by Erasure’ (Lesmes 2020), which explores the relationship between photographs, memories, and the act of narrating the stories behind those memories and photographs. I put this in dialogue with Sarah Polley’s documentary ‘Stories We Tell’ (2012), which follows the filmmaker as she tries to piece together who her late mother was, through the stories and testimonies of her family members. The performance centered on how the act of telling a story, describing a memory, brings it back to life, while the film follows a cacophony of voices to reconstruct the character of Polley’s mother mixed with different techniques (interviews, archive material, staging) to illustrate memory and how this affects the way in which audiences connect to the film. I understand memory as an embodied experience in a relational and affective contact with the world, one that is constantly being reinterpreted and transformed. Relying on the notion of heterochronicity (Karlholm 2017, Moxey 2018) and the Bergsonian understanding of time, I explore how, in both the film and the performance, memories – or the lack of them – time, and narrative interact with each other. I propose the concept of a negative specter of memory, which refers to the things we can only recognize by their absence, the knowledge of the missing part, only possible because it is gone. A void. My goal is to explore how these ideas can have an impact on the possibilities that film and arts offer as ways to explore the relationship between memories, narratives, time, and their voids.