Where: Viewing Room, 2nd Floor, Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE

Performance 1: 13.00 - 14.30 on Tues 4 Nov 

Performance 2: 15.30 - 17.00 on Tues 4 Nov 

Access arrangements: Accessibility | Wellcome Collection

The event is free, but capacity is limited so registration via Eventbrite is required.

Please register

You are warmly invited to witness and respond to Memory Machine, a live performance-research event created by Our Tiny Factory (PhD researcher Heni Hale with performers Ben Ash, Ali Baybutt, Alice Gale-Feeny, Rachel Lopez de la Nieta, with Tavistock staff, and with video-maker Tony Wadham).

This event brings together three distinct research communities — dance and practice-as-research, contemporary Tavistock practitioners, and Wellcome staff, researchers, and associates — to explore new ways of thinking about archives, memory, and embodied research.

Each performance lasts one hour and is followed by a 30-minute collective conversation with the artists, hosted by dramaturge Nikki Tomlinson.

About Memory Machine

At its core, Memory Machine revisits the traces left by action researchers from the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (TIHR) observing a sulphur recovery plant in Manchester (1959–61), as part of their early work on socio-technical systems and human relations in industrial settings.

Drawing on materials from the TIHR archive at Wellcome, this installation-performance examines the practices of observing, fieldnoting, recording, mediating and remembering. Through dance, text, spoken word, video and sound, Our Tiny Factory forms its own production line — a kind of “memory machine” — exposing meticulous-almosts and not-quites; fractured and incomplete processes of remembering and re-enactment.

Invitation

This is an invitation to:

• Reflect on embodied methodologies in archive research;
• Explore connections between dance, social science, systems theory, and museum practices;
• Engage in a cross-disciplinary conversation about how we witness, record, and make meaning together.
  
  
  

Watch

This video assembles some samples of our group practices together where we formed a temporary organisation over 10 days.

Featuring artists Ali Baybutt, Alice Gale-Feeny, Ben Ash, Heni Hale, Rachel Lopez de la Nieta and Marina Collard, and filming by Tony Wadham.

Archive materials featured : Notes for Courtaulds write-up,1959 SA/TIH/B/2/8/4/1. Wellcome Collection/Automation project / Courtaulds

Notes about this invitation

This event forms part of Heni’s practice-as-research PhD project Relational Practice and the Tavistock Institute Archive: Embodiment and Social Relations, a collaborative doctoral award with Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University and Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (TIHR).

TIHR is an organisation based in London engaging in independent, global, social science research, consultancy and evaluation. TIHR has historically modelled a whole-systems approach to human relations and group dynamics. The 75+ year archive draws on its roots in psychoanalytic theory and systems psychodynamics.

C-DaRE specialises in an inclusive interdisciplinary approach to artistic and scholarly dance research in areas like cultural heritage, computing and AI, intellectual property, health and well-being and practice research.

As part of a doctoral research project, contributions will help develop a research methodology and/or insights about collective embodied readings in the archive. Photography will take place in compliance with Coventry University’s code of ethics. Details about how your contribution is documented and data used will be outlined upon registration and before the event.

This research project was funded by a Researcher Development Award from AHRC through Midlands4Cities.

Thanks to Wellcome Collection, Tavistock Institute and TrinityLaban for space and production support.