MEMORY, SPEAK! On the Present and Some Future Events
12/12/2025, 7 – 11 PM

The long-term documentary will be realised by artist Anna Jermolaewa over the next ten years.

Friday, 12 Dec

7 pm: Aurélia Kalisky (DE)
8 pm: Nina Katchadourian & Sina Najafi (EN)
Jury: Susanne Sachsse (Chair), Alice Hasters and Heinrich Horwitz

Saturday, 13 Dec

3 pm: Farkhondeh Sharoudi (DE),
4 pm: Aliaksei Bratochkin (EN/RU)
5 pm: Lamin Leroy Gibba (DE)
7 pm: Vaginal Davis (EN)
8 pm: Shadi Habib Allah (EN)
9 pm: Alena Jabarine (DE)
Jury: Susanne Sachsse (Chair), Alice Hasters, Heinrich Horwitz, Anselm Franke, Karin Harrasser, Jakob Racek

Friday, 12 Dec

Round 1:  9:30 – 10 pm 
Round 2: 10 – 10:30 pm

With Aliaksei Bratachkin / Jakob Racek, Guillaume Cailleau, Shadi Habib Allah, Karin Harrasser, Aurelia Kalisky, Anton Kats / Sarah Lewis Cappellari, Mukenge / Schellhammer, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Farkhondeh Shahroudi

Trouble remembering? Let’s try a different Theatre of Memory. Mobile Academy Berlin presents a performative proposal for memory culture in a migration society.

The future has always been here. It awaits reanimation in the unrealized emancipatory projects of the past. In the performance “Memory Speak!” it emerges through polyphonic biographical storytelling. Discourses and debates on memory culture are not the focus here. Instead, the act of remembering and the memories of the people themselves take to the stage: detailed, precarious, and magnificently incoherent. The installation and performance open a space of resonance in which visitors can encounter diverse techniques and forms of remembering over the course of two days.

The stage in “Memory Speak!” functions as a screen memory – in both the literal and the psychological sense. Collective memory here is a game of addition, not a process of reduction. Everything is happening now; nothing is past; we are in the midst of it. Widely separated places, times, and events, strange and familiar experiences, what is present and what is absent –  intersect across three stages of memory. Visitors can move freely through the space and tune into the various stations on different channels via infrared headphones. 

Mobile Academy Berlin has invited nine candidates to test their powers of recollection in a two-day casting in front of a three-member jury – live on stage. Are they suitable protagonists for a long-term documentary that will accompany them over ten years, capturing how they will have experienced the decade to come? Can they become seismographs of future social change? The jury, composed of experienced interviewers and attentive listeners, is particularly interested in the candidates’ analytical or intuitive ability to make possible futures flash up in their memories and biographies.

Guiding the conversations is a questionnaire based on oral history interviewing techniques, artists’ questionnaires, our work with the Colombian Truth Commission, and the specific expertise of the jury members. The Berlin casting is the first part of a series, next stop is Vienna in April 2026. The subsequent long-term documentary film will be realized over the coming ten years by Russia-born Vienna based artist Anna Jermolaewa.

We listen in on the rehearsal of a radio broadcast. In loops and breaks, in words, music, and sound, it returns to what was never meant to be remembered. The program recalls El Corte, the forgotten Parsley Massacre in the Dominican Republic in 1937, one of the twentieth century’s most silenced genocides, where Black life was violently severed from land, history, and collective memory. How can one speak of lives seemingly cut from history, yet still pulsing beneath it, insisting on disrupting the plantation logics that structure the present? The transmission tunes into the frequencies of what refuses to cease: sounds and dreams, fragments of memory and family stories, theoretical, literary, and poetic traces conjuring ghosts driven from official archives.

Among them, the Sugar Woman drifts back through sound, first appearing in Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones, bittersweet and sharp, teasing the edges of memory, insisting that what was silenced still trembles with the beating of revolt. Texts written and read by Sarah Lewis-Cappellari are spliced, layered, and amplified into a live sound collage through the G.O.S.P. Sound System by Ukrainian artist and musician Anton Kats. You see, I know a sugar woman who dances in chains but laughs at locks, / who wears a muzzle but speaks in dreams, / who vanishes but never leaves. / She’s got a story that’ll make your teeth rot.

Kasala in Tshiluba means invocation, conjuration, or praise. According to a definition by E. M. Mirembe, it is a free-verse praise poem, performed by trained specialists at funerals and other family gatherings. It introduces people and their biographies in an evocative language that does not aim to convey information so much as to evoke emotion. A Kasala performance can hold the attention of the addressed community for hours, bringing together the present and the absent, the living and the dead. It shifts with the context in which it is performed, is never the same twice.

In the video installation by the Congolese-German artist duo Mukenge/Schellhammer, a Kasala unfolds for the Congolese art scene in Kinshasa. How can art history be written in a place where discourse and debate live mainly through spoken word and are rarely archived? The video shows a performance by the Kasala reciter Cécile Tuseku in the art space Plateforme Contemporaine. Her recitation gathers actors and ancestors of the art scene, recounting biographies and initiations, artistic movements and relationships. Rather than fixing a chronological art history, it opens a performative space of collective remembering. The video is accompanied by live performances from the Austrian-Congolese poet and performer Fiston Mwanza Mujila, whose contemporary poetic form of Kasala enters into dialog with Cécile Tuseku’s performance.

Aliaksei Bratachkin Historian and former head of the Public History Department at the European College of Liberal Arts in Belarus; his research includes memory politics in illiberal contexts · Guillaume Cailleau French filmmaker, artist, and producer; co-director of Direct Action, awarded Best Film in the Berlinale Encounters section · Vaginal Davis Musician, author, artist, zine-maker, filmmaker, overall icon of Black queer counterculture; twenty years after her move from L.A. to Berlin, the Gropius Bau recently presented her solo exhibition Magnificient Product · Anselm Franke Curator, writer, and Professor of Curatorial Studies at the Zurich University of the Arts; in early December, he is co-opening the symposium Der große Kanton: Rise & Fall of the BRD · Christian Fritzenwanker Austrian Hair and Make-Up Artist currently based in Berlin · Lamin Leroy Gibba Actor, screenwriter, director, and film producer; creator, lead actor, and head writer of the series Black Fruit · Shadi Habib Allah Palestinian artist and filmmaker whose works explore informal economies and marginalized infrastructures and document networks of survival · Karin Harrasser Director of the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Art in Linz, and translator of Donna Haraway · Alice Haruko Hasters German journalist, audiobook narrator, podcaster, and author; her last book is called Identitätskrise · Heinrich Horwitz Director, choreographer, and actor; activist for queer visibility in art and culture · Hannah Hurtzig Director of the Mobile Academy Berlin for 25 years, the theme of memory reappears again and again · Alena Jabarine German-Palestinian journalist and author of The Last Sky: My Search for Palestine · Anna Jermolaewa Russian-born Vienna based conceptual artist and Professor of Experimental Art in Linz; represented the Austrian Pavilion at the most recent Venice Biennale · Marian Kaiser Media theorist, writer, and project maker, Co-director of MAB for 10 years · Aurélia Kalisky French literary scholar, expert on forms of testimony, comparative genocide studies, and memory studies · Nina Katchadourian American interdisciplinary artist and educator of Armenian-Finnish background, living and working in Berlin · Anton Kats Ukrainian-born artist, musician, and Professor of Sonic and Listening Practices at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts · Sarah Lewis-Cappellari Resarcher, maker, and educator working in the interstices of performance, art, Black and Caribbean Studies · Melinda Matern Art sociologist and founder of the feminist collective "Zwischen Institution und Utopie“ · Fiston Mwanza Mujila Congolese-Austrian writer of poetry, prose, and plays; teaches, mediates, and publishes African literature · Mukenge/Schellhammer A two-headed Congolese-German artist duo producing work between Berlin and Kinshasa since 2016 · Sina Najafi Founder and editor-in-chief of Cabinet, a quarterly magazine of art and culture · Jakob Racek Head of the Information Department at the Goethe-Institut in Munich; from 2018 to 2022 director of the Goethe-Institut in Minsk, Belarus · Susanne Sachsse Artist, actor, theatre director, and co-founder of the artist collective CHEAP · Eran Schaerf Artist, writer, maker of radio plays and films; based in Berlin · Farkhondeh Shahroudi Tehran-born poet and visual artist based in Berlin · Florian Stirnemann visual architect, designs spaces for the MAB, member of raumlabor berlin · Elena Tilli Video designer, scenographer, technologist, and scholar · Cécile Tuseku Professional Kasala performer, born in Mbuji-Mayi in the Kasaï region of the Democratic Republic of Congo · Boris Wilsdorf Producer and sound engineer, founder of studio andereBaustelle in Berlin

Memory is the opposite of storing and retrieving. It is the accomplice of forgetting, comes over us rather than we come to it. It accepts no strict boundaries between yesterday and today, happens exactly now, and is oriented toward the future. It does not exist outside itself, it shifts, changes, and moves. It cannot tell what was, but what is to be told, or would have to be told. Damit lässt sich kein Staat machen – no state can be built with it – as the German proverb goes. “Memory Speak!” opens a space of listening in which this particular form of memory can appear.

“Memory Speak!” continues a line of memory projects by Mobile Academy Berlin that began a quarter century ago with the “Branch Office for Temporary Remembering” (inspired by Aleida Assmann) in Hamburg. It was followed by “The Milieu of the Dead” in Vienna and Berlin from 2013 to 2018, “Dialogs from the Dark Room” in Novosibirsk in 2016, as well as a series of projects developed in collaboration with the Colombian Truth Commission (Comisión de la Verdad) in Bogotá and Barrancabermeja between 2018 and 2021. The next stop for “Memory Speak!” after Berlin will be Vienna in April 2026.

The dialog with the Dead cannot cease until they have
given back the future that was buried with them.
Heiner Müller

A project by Mobile Akademie Berlin, in cooperation with the Akademie der Künste. Funded by the Capital Cultural Fund Berlin. Accompanied by a research project by Co.Lab Remembrance work – aesthetic-political practices / University of Art and Design Linz.