Our “Memory Library” project aims to uncover and make public some of the memories Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library at Harvard and its network libraries have created and held for the past 100 years; memories which have not yet been known to a public. We began by creating an archive of oral histories from library staff, librarians, alumni, and students who used the library. This instantiation of the project represents one “performance” of the archive– what you see is documentation of a ten-minute performance on the steps of Widener, accompanied by a radio documentary taken from the oral histories and our research into Widener Memorial Library. Seeking to disrupt the space in front of Widener, on the steps and plinth on the yard side, we ‘projected’ the audio of the actual voices of the interviewees speaking about their memories onto the neoclassical architecture of the main library and used silent (pantomime) performance to activate the space.
By Yvette Drury Dubinsky, Shu Cao Mo, and Joe Steele
password is ‘memorylib’
Memory Library Widener Test from Joe Steele on