Minnesmonument, Participatory performance, 2025
Performed at: UTRYMNING, farewell party, 25 januari, 2025, Göteborgs konsthall
By Josefina Björk
Dance and choreography: Ina Dokmo
Drawings: Christoffer Stigberg
Sounddesign: Adde Andreas Huumonen

After 101 years Göteborgs konsthall is moving from its house in Gothenburgs city center - Götaplatsen, to an old slaughterhouse in Gamlestan in suburban Gothenburg. For this occasion Göteborgs konsthall invited five performance artists for a one night only celebration and farewell party marking the end of this era.

Minnes monument (memorial) is a work about memory and its connection to the somatic, emotional and spatial senses, but also an attempt to translate a memory into dance and drawing. In the work I ask visitors if they want to share a memory of the konsthall with me. The piece begins with a scan in the visitors memory bank for a memory that interests them, when the memory is found we walk to the spot in the building where the memory starts and the revisiting begins. As the visitor takes me to revisit all the spaces in the building where the memory took place, we are trying to remember what happened that day, how the weather was, where they came from, how they were feeling, how their body felt in the room, what objects and persons they were relating to in the space and how they felt about them. Was the memory about an encounter with an art object? Were they visiting the konsthall with someone they no longer have dear? Were they to perform something and was nervous? Or was there an event that puzzled them? When the memory is over the visitor gets a chair to sit on, I leave and the dancer Ina Dokmo, who has listened to the memory in headphones approaches the visitor and offers an interpretation of the memory in dance and movement. Ina uses her intuitive senses to go into the visitor's perspective and to interpret the underlying movements, directions, attractions and moods of the relations and dynamics between people and objects in the memory. While moving Ina is telling the visitor what she senses in relation to what object, person or toward herself (the visitor) to make the interpretation more understandable. While Ina is dancing, the painter Christoffer Stigberg in his turn is interpreting Inas movement through abstract drawings on the wall. In the end of the piece the visitor gets to see the drawing and tell Christoffer their name and the year of the memory. In the end of the evening the walls of the konsthall were covered with abstract interpretations of visitors' memories of the space.