Emil Hrvatin's Memory Cabinets

Camillo memo 4.0: The Cabinet of Memories—A Tear Donating Session, live installation by Emil Hrvatin, Ljubljana Museum, Slovenia, September 1998.

Memory is a matter of time continuity, of having clearly the past, present, and future in synch with our bodies. Due to the Internet and computerized culture, it seems we have lost the past, and the future has meanwhile disappeared somewhere in cyberspace. In the instantaneous and obsessive (tele)presence that we live in today, accessing the Web and receiving audio/video streams, we are no longer in synch with the "stuff" of memory, and therefore memory is waiting to be reappropriated or reinvented, when the time comes.

Camillo memo 4.0: The Cabinet of Memories-A Tear Donating Session is a hybrid performance action, atableau vivant installation, or simply a theatre play for one visitor, user, participant at a time. It was directed and produced by Emil Hrvatin, a theatre director from Ljubljana, in order to reappropriate the idea of memory in itself in a time of fluid contemporaneity. The Cabinet of Memories (www.ljudmila.org/camillo)originated from the ideas of the Italian Renaissance master of the art of memory, Giulio Camillo (1480-1544). Hrvatin's projectis an extremely intelligent way of questioning the value of memory. In The Cabinet of Memories the visitor/participant/memory retriever has the possibility to enter three rooms/boxes/cabinets: those of Individual Memory, of Collective Memory, and, if nothing works out, the participant is asked to enter the Cabinet of Physiological Memory.

In the Cabinet of Individual Memory, a celestial blue satin-covered room/box/cabinet (1 x 1.2 x 2m big), there is only a mirror on the wall opposite to the box's entrance door. The door of the box closes soon after one of the participants expresses a wish to participate and s/he can spend as much time alone as desired in the cabinet. The memories recollected here are the most valuable, and the participant is awarded with a golden certificate. But you will rightly ask yourself how are we sure that s/he was successful in recollecting memories? Hrvatin has constructed an engine, special test-tubes in the form of pyramidal eyeglasses with which the tears are collected from the visitor's eyes; if the donation of tears is successful, the participant gets a (golden) certificate. Hrvatin is Fritz Lang's Doc (and not Doctor) Mabuse; here the Western's populist slang of renaming doctor into doc denotes precisely that the Cabinet of Memories is a softer version of introspection of the emotions of random participants.

The act of reinvention of memory is connected with crying, with fluids from the body, as the participant has to prove his or her successful achievement of memories by crying. In the Cabinet of Individual Memory, by donating tears that are collected in test-tube eyeglasses, the participant receives the golden certificate. The award is proof of the efficiency capturing the memories without a prosthesis; no extra help is given in the celestial blue box. To facilitate the process of memorization, only a mirror is allowed, perhaps to look deep into the eyes and into the imaginary. The position of the participant in the Cabinet of Individual Memory is the position of an actor. As a monologue play it lacks a public, only the participant's gaze looks out of the mirror. The user is a self-enclosed system that forces his or her inferiority to produce fluids as the self reconnects with memories. S/he is a container, with the wishful idea that deep introspection into a self will produce tears. Are memories a matter of auto-induction?

But if we cannot function in the Cabinet of Individual Memory—the tears are not spurting out at all—then it is possible to ask to enter the Cabinet of Collective Memory. Collective Memory cabinets differ, as Hrvatin has said, from situation to situation, from...