MARCIO
CARVALHO
Power Over Memory - A case study
In 1985, musician and scholar Clive Wearing contracted a virus that attacked his nervous system and shut down his Hippocampus. In the following decades after this neurological damage, Wearing perpetually ‘wakes up’ every seven to thirty seconds with no recollection of the previous moment.
Power Over Memory, a performance piece by Márcio Carvalho, that considers Wearing’s state of amnesia and compares this to the case of the fictional figure John Rambo. The questions brought up by comparing Rambo with a well-documented medical case not only draws analogies between kinds of memory and the nature of remembrance, but also asks how fictions such as cinema and media images act upon the mind. The resulting performance is a playful examination of memory, biology, history, fantasy, and politics, emphasizing the complexities that occur at the interstices of these subjects.
"Power Over Memory - A case study" was presented at LIVE Biennale, Vancouver, Canada, Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin and Thessaloniki Biennial, Thessaloniki, Greece
