“(…) Time lived, time forgotten, time shared. What does time inflict – dust and disintegration? My memories help me live in the present, and I want them to survive. I am a prisoner of my emotions. You have to tell your story and then you have to forget it. You forget and forgive. That makes you free.” (Louise Bourgeois in Louise Bourgeois, Phaidon, London 2003).

Tille Bortolotti has been working on this project on memory for several years, collecting discarded personal clothing, witnesses to her past and traces of her history.

The performance, which touches on a theme dear to artists present at ASSAB ONE with their works, such as Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle and Mona Hatoum, returns them randomly piled up in a large container bag hanging from the ceiling. Participants can extract them through the holes from which they overflow and decide whether to take possession of them or leave them in another container.

The bag, a metaphor for the head/mind, preserves emotions by storing the memory of time lived, while the garments, like accumulated fragments of an individual history, are pooled and entrusted to other people to keep memories alive, letting them go.