'The Intentional Degradation of a Memory' (2017)
Video Installation (12:38)
This work comes out of my ongoing process of trying to live with and rework the impact of PTSD. In therapy I came across techniques like CBT and NLP, where you’re asked to picture the traumatic memory, drain all the colour out of it, shrink it, and run it backwards like a bad tape.
I wanted to take that idea and do something more physical with it. Something messier. I brought in three different groups of actors and gave each of them the same four props. The first group got the full story. The second got less. The third barely knew anything. I stepped back and let them build whatever they could from what they were given.
Every version they made drifted further from what actually happened. The truth kept slipping. But that was the point. I didn’t want control. I wanted to see what happened when the story wasn’t mine anymore.
I cut their performances together with found footage from the time. Old tapes, fragments, stuff that had been sitting in boxes for years. What came out of it wasn’t the truth, but it was something I could look at without freezing up. A story with just enough distance to let me breathe.
