Speculative Memory and the Architecture of Absence

Abstract

This thesis develops memory as a speculative, embodied, and performative method for reframing the city. Moving away from institutional, traditional conceptions of the archive, it suggests an alternative archive, one which is intimate, affective, fragmentary, and carried through the body. This research synthesizes feminist, postcolonial, and site-specific theories on performance, integrating intimate and collective memory, dislocated narrative, and dislocated place into the cityscape through an audio walk tour in my performance entitled Tell Me a Story Before I Can Remember. This walk reframes Helsinki through overlapping memory layers drawn from Tehran, using the audience's bodies as listening and witnessing archives.The thesis argues that walking, most particularly a walking practice involving getting lost, exists as a method for resistance as much as it is an instrument for archival reactivation. Through frictional overlayering between and among sound, gesture, garment, and word, memory exists as a radical means for accessing and inhabiting urban absence, resisting dominant narrative, and speculating on what might have been. The text engages theory from thinkers like Saidiya Hartman, Diana Taylor, Michel de Certeau, and Ruth Hellier-Tinoco, and responds to the work of artists like Janet Cardiff, Sophie Calle, and Ann Hamilton. Its lyric and non-linear form reflects the texture of memory itself, flowing, incomplete, and recursive, demanding presence over proof, sensation over document.Finally, this research encourages a reevaluation of the archive as a live, performative act, one that dissolves distinctions between absence and presence, fact and fiction, here and there.