room within a room

2025
2024
2024
2023
2021
2020
2018
2018
2018
2017

installation + performance
installation + performance
lecture perforrmance
performance
multimedia performance
music performance
virtual reality
installation + performance
installation
virtual reality

Teaching

Info

Mid-Residency Show, Installation, Interactive Sound + Dance Performance

Room Within a Room, a mixed media installation and immersive live sonic and dance performance, begins with a simple act: remembering and re-membering. Activating memory as a regenerative and degenerative archive, this work is a complex interweaving of data and its recursive recollection. The work is positioned within a series of explorations interrogating how memory — bodily, familial, and collective — is stored and embodied.

Through installation and choreographic, the project asks: how or where is memory stored when our tools for remembering -- from muscle to machine -- begin to degrade?

This project underscores two terminologies: remembering, the act of recall, and re-membering, the collaged methodology of reconstruction. Both are an act of survival and resistance, as much as they are a punisher and holder of power. The project continuously questions who gets to remember their own history, how it gets relayed, and how the memory shifts upon retrospection or introspection. Drawing from the theoretical frameworks of Wendy Chun’s Enduring Ephemeral and inspired by works like Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document and Adrian Piper’s diaristic practice, Room Within a Room excavates personal childhood memories regarding home, body and belonging through acts of archiving, exteriorizing, and re-performing information. The performance asks of the observer to enter a lived and reliving memory, and witness its preservation and release.

Drawing from childhood photographs, digital landscapes of Google Maps, recomposed floor plans of childhood homes and autobiographical memory indexing, the work explores memory as an archive in flux. Over a yearlong process of recollection, Room Within a Room unfolds as both an interrogation of the cultural belief in digital permanence and a tender methodology of reminiscence; examining memory recall and the images reconstructed in its wake.

Photo Documentation by Airis Encarnacion and Lauren Villaneuva