MEMORY, LANGUAGE & PUBLIC SPACE

Source / generator

Days 4–5: “Do you remember?”; Day 4: “I am / you are”; Day 6: Tallinn Old Town storytelling.

In “Do you remember?”, two people sit opposite each other. One asks, “Do you remember…?” and the other answers. Questions can concern joy, loss, films, family, public nudity, technology, death and everyday memory. The point is not psychological therapy; Mart explicitly keeps the structure formal: question → answer → next question, without explanatory side-conversation.

Answers can be true, invented, associative, short, long or uncertain. The question itself reveals something about the questioner; the answer reveals and withholds. The exercise investigates selective memory, self-curation, the fragment, image through language and revealing / withholding. A simple sentence can produce a complete image. Silence and refusal remain valid.

In “I am / you are”, one performer assigns an identity to another: “You are a clock.” The other accepts it—“Yes, I am a clock, but you are…”—and movement and sound continue until the identity changes. Identity becomes temporary, relational, assigned and performed. With groups, clarity of order, timing and space determines whether the relational structure remains readable.

On Day 6, the group walked into Tallinn Old Town. Each participant had the open task: tell a story in public space. The story could be real or invented. The shift is from black box to city. The environment becomes dramaturgical: accidental audiences, existing architecture, historical sites and no guaranteed theatrical frame.

This extends Mart's central question: What happens when the context is already full of stories?

What the protocol trains

Language as action, memory as selective material, the relation between fiction and reality, public-space awareness and situational dramaturgy.

Artistic problem

How can a question, an assigned identity or a story activate a situation without closing interpretation? Mart investigates how language creates images and relations while always leaving something unrevealed.