10th December 2024 at 19.00 in Mini teater
Tickets are available at the Mini teater box office, at all Eventim outlets and online.
Mementophonia is a music documentary performance that puts the importance of human memory at its very core. It explores how it shapes our consciousness, our identity and our sense of wholeness, and what it all means when our memories are so relentlessly fragile and deceptive. Music occupies a special place in this context, as it is often the memory of music that persists in our brains longer than any other.
In collaboration with renowned instrumentalist Klemn Hvala, the author Mateja Starič builds a sound-visual collage with vocals and cello. Live music is interwoven with audio and video recordings of two different narratives - a conversation with Mateja's 96-year-old grandmother Rozi and an interview with the renowned German neurologist Prof. Dr. Valentin Riedl. The latter offers some scientific insights into the workings of the human brain, while both the light and dark sides of Roza's past are revealed. The central motif of her memoirs is a poem from her youth, which she spent in a Nazi camp in Germany during the war. However, these dark experiences do not dominate her thoughts - her memory keeps returning to the poem.
Through the ongoing manipulation of the footage before us, fragments of the story are methodically assembled and made sense of from indistinct fragments. In the same way, individual syllables, tones and noises are gradually transformed into a complete musical composition. The performance thus symbolically imitates the process of memory construction and at the same time evokes the anticipation of its dissolution.
Almost a century of subjective life story and objective scientific truth confront each other. They are brought together by the inexplicable beauty of what, at the end of a life's journey, seems to be the last song of memory - music.
Dr. Prof. Med. Valentin Riedl, with whom we will have a short conversation after the performance. We will open the floor for questions and comments from the audience. Memory loss is a sensitive and relevant topic that affects us all on both an individual and societal level.
