Installation "Memory Palace" at METRO Kinokulturhaus Wien, 2017, photo: Virgil Widrich
Installation "Memory Palace" at METRO Kinokulturhaus Wien, 2017, photo: Alexi Pelekanos
Installation "Memory Palace" at METRO Kinokulturhaus Wien, 2017, photo: Virgil Widrich
"Memory Palace", test at handmitauge, September 2017, photo: Virgil Widrich

Memory Palace

"Memory Palace" is the name of a technique for committing things to memory by linking new material to be learned to a known location in order to make the sequence easy to remember. This is especially effective if a location is used that most people know best: the house in which they lived when they were children.
However, the house that we built for this purpose is an impossible house of mirrors, projections and light mixed with family stories in conflict between trying to remember and trying to forget. The house is built on wobbly ground, a house that never existed and never can. It has no specific size – and because it will soon be inhabited by new memories, it is empty. But an empty house produces different feelings of emptiness depending on whether somebody is still to arrive, or the last of us have already departed.
The rooms offer no reference points and no orientation between "inside" and "outside", they are part of a tour through the memories in a location at different points in time that change with every glance and continue to dissolve.
In the end there is no more there: the house has left the building.

The installation "Memory Palace" reflects the house from the film "Night of a 1000 Hours" which has been built using rear projections, backdrops, props, costumes and light and brought to life around the actors for the film.

The work "Memory Palace" is shown at the exhibition "ANALOG_DIGITAL. Media (Ex) changes"
– a coproduction of Filmarchiv Austria and sound: frame.

METRO Kinokulturhaus, Johannesgasse 4, 1010 Vienna, 3.10.2017 to 28.01.2018METRO Kinokulturhaus, Johannesgasse 4, 1010 Vienna, 3.10.2017 to 28.01.2018, daily 3 pm to 9 pm

An installation by Virgil Widrich inspired by his feature film "Night of a 1000 Hours"
Projection: handmitauge
Jakob Hütter, Thomas Planitzer, Jakob Figo, Daniel Mathe, Martin Winterleitner, Hannah Besenhart

Excerpts from "Night of the 1000 hours," by Virgil Widrich – courtesy of AMOUR FOU Luxembourg, AMOUR FOU Vienna, KeyFilm & Golden Girls

Events

03. October 2017 – 28. January 2018
Creation of the media installation "Memory Palace" for the exhibition "ANALOG_DIGITAL. Media (Ex) changes" at METRO Kinokulturhaus, Vienna (October 3, 2017 to January 28, 2018).