what is archive for you?

It is a way to store, organize and evaluate information. This can happen in different ways; through recorded and written language in archives and computers, but it can also happen through physical action and personal history, that in turn shape our way of being and behaving. I think this kind of archive is closer to how the way our brain actually remembers. I will try to describe this process in my own words: When we are subject to a sensation, be that of our sight, smell, hearing, taste or touch, the neurological impulse travels through our nervous system as an electro-impulse to the brain. There it is transformed into a chemical-impulse that continues the travel into the brain. Instead of storing it in a place somewhere, the brain traces the pattern that the electro-chemical impulse takes as it enters the brain. The brain then records the path that this impulse takes as it ricochets through the different centers of the brain.
The next time when one is being exposed to that same sensation, it is the repetition of that same path through the brain that is the actual memory. Not the place to where it traveled. One can say that memory is a movement. But the repetition of that movement is never the exact same as the first time. The path is always slightly different from the previous time this occurred, and subsequently the memory is slightly different each time we remember it. I would like to work with memory, archive and history in the same manner. More like a living brain than a computer.
If this seems unclear I suggest reading “Descartes Error” by the American/ Portugeese neurology scientist Antonio Damasio.

what kind oh history are we talking about?

In this case it is Romanian contemporary dance history, but I think this can be applied to any history; personal, national or world history. I also don’t think it is very interesting to think of memory in national terms. Subjective memory is more interesting on a personal and global term.
In relation to the way I described memory as a movement through the brain, I remember something interesting that happened at the CNDB last year. There was a tribute to the Romanian dancer and choreographer Trixie Chechais* with a panel presenting and discussing his life, his work and the impact he had on Romanian dance. The audience consisted, apart from the usual suspects, of friends, family and colleges of the late choreographer and other people who had known him, worked with him or seen his work. During the evening it seemed that the stories and the photos presented by the panel started to ricochet through the room, very much like the electro-chemical impulses would in a brain. But this was a collective brain, as if a collective memory had been released, resulting in an avalanche of information coming in from all directions. People were talking at the same time, contradicting each other, and even contradicting themselves as their thinking got louder and louder. I remember looking through the room and thinking to myself ‘this is what remains of a lifetime of choreographic work: a lot of memories, emotions and vague notions of space and time’. In fact one of the loudest debates concerned whether one of Trixie’s performances had taken place before or after the infamous earthquake of 1977. I personally think that this messy rapport is the most honest account of dance history one possibly can have.

is each selection of events subjective?

No. Some of the knowledge we gain second hand, through other sources, and we can say that they have an agreed-upon-objective-value. But also these events were once experienced subjectively. Like the impact of war,
a natural disaster or a sexual-revolution can have on one person’s life.
But when an event is being experienced by a large group of people, individually and subjectively, it transforms through the shared experience into a historical fact, a so-called objective fact. But the memory-process is still subjective. Even the second-hand experience can subjectively be experienced, through empathy, one of humankind’s most refine attributes.

is history debatable?

Definitely! It’s only the survivors who write history, and thinking that the ones that didn’t survive took their stories with them in their graves, we should take into account that we only get to hear half of the story.

is each reconstruction a sum of absent events in the sense that when you
reconstruct you always face some absences?

Well, since it is the survivors that wrote history, and we know that that is only half of the story, then sure there must be made room for that absent part of history, doubt, contradictions and even self-contradictions in our reading of the past. After all history is a written story: partly subjectively experienced, partly indirectly experienced, partly fiction and partly absent. I think that we shouldn’t be so afraid to question history, and not bind it too close to our identity. To say that “without a past there is no future” is not true. It’s a trap to self-delusion. Instead we should allow ourselves to leave history behind and live our story now, knowing that there are gaps and absences in our ever-changing memories.

Brynjar Abel Bandlien