"Walking into Forgetting" is an immersive performance lecture in which Grace Euna Kim's text 'Forgetting as Activism' is presented in tandem with a reading and retelling of Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

The piece presents a performer in the role of the lecturer, embodied as split in two forms - the physical or actual (lying on the ground at the museum entrance) and the virtual (video image projection at the lecture site).  A voice reads the text of Plato's Cave with revealing signifiers (words that would identify the text) removed. Simultaneously, the virtual body responds, and as she eventually leaves the frame of the video image, her physical counterpart slowly crawls (on her back), from the museum entrance into the lecture site, from the museum entrance into the lecture site, with eyes closed, under the chairs and through them. Gradually joined by performers among the audience, she breaks open the space between the chairs, knocking them down, rearranging them with and without people seated on them. Through the non-verbal body, the performers subvert the symbolic structures and systems of meaning that frame the audience, inviting a reconsideration of its social reality—from violence into love, destruction into creation, chaos into harmony, power into vulnerability, perception into actuality—bodies seem to touch and collide but do not. It ends with the final question of Plato’s cave – what will the prisoners do with the liberated one who returned to try to awaken them to their reality being an illusion? Would they choose the discomfort of freedom?

Concept, Artistic Direction, Choreography: Grace Euna Kim
Performers: Vitaly Kim, Alena Chiklina, Katarina Maran 
Voice: Yaroslava Zakharova
Photos: Anastasia Patsey