It is likely that there is an old wives’ tale in dusty books of fables somewhere, about mothers who either protect or mangle memories. But fiction often stems from vicious reality where even mothers — guardians — struggle to have a say. Nimi Ravindran’s To Forget is to Remember is to Forget, an exhibition-performance, at the Goethe Institut on October 25 and 26 by Prakriti Foundation, looks to tell the story of a daughter struggling to remember everything that her mother forgot.
Through tape recorders, transistors, radios, Mp3 players, jars, walls and speakers, Nimi looks to encapsulate her mother’s life and her tryst with Alzheimer’s through performance art. Library of the lost.| Photo Credit:Aakriti Chandervanshi “My mother was an excellent singer and she sang in five to six languages.
But the thing about her was that she only sang the saddest songs ever. So I put all of that into the performance. Her life though isn’t all tragic.
The Alzimer’s is just a portion of her long, 50-something life,” she says. Nimi began work on this show 10 years ago. It was initially conceptualised as a theatre production because of her own background in the field, but she found herself bereft of a vocabulary that could capture her experience of life, illness and grief.
The show was instead personified in the form of installations and performances. Through songs, voices, pictures, videos and jars of memories, Nimi said that she reconstructed versions of the time when she and.