The project is concerned with the ephemeral nature of memory, and particularly the fractured and unreliable state of childhood memories. We found ourselves intrigued by how vulnerable our childhood memories are to manipulation; each time a memory is revisited, discussed, and shared, it shifts its shape, refocuses, recalibrates, rendering us even more distant from it as we attempt to recapture it.

Inspired largely by the themes of Tarkovsky’s ‘The Mirror’, our performance aims to create a multisensory embodiment of the troubled space of memory, exploring how clarity and certainty are always out of reach, and the recapturing of a moment in its entirety always impossible. The title forms part of the multilingual text, spoken in all of the group’s childhood languages, that plays in the background of the piece. This title echoes for us the experience of taking a train journey, with station place names flashing past the window too quickly to be read, refusing the passenger the opportunity to anchor themselves within a specific location; a metaphor for our attempts to retain a grip on a past that cannot ever truly be revisited.

performance by: Jessica Beechey, Rachel Fenn, Shuyi Gao, James Hammond, Emilia Schlosser, Theo Zhykharyev