How do you want to be remembered? If you study the archives of humankind you will see an one-sided image of humanity; an image that is focused on measurability and control. People are reduced to comparable data, to categorizable differences, in order to optimize control over fate.
But is this how you want to be remembered? As strings of data, feeding self-sustaining algorithms?
Choreograph Katja Heitmann wants to record a different history. She wants to create an archive in which the most essential, paradoxical and elusive core of mankind is preserved. An attempt to archive the impossible: an archive of human movement.
The body as an archive.
Motus Mori is a long-term project in continuous development. The archive travels from city to city, coming back year after year to meet local residents, collect their movements and create bespoke manifestations. Our dream is to create a true MONUMENT of movement that can stand the test of time.
Based on the ever growing archive we create new artworks. These vary from impressive, large scale live exhibitons in which the dancer-archivists keep the movement going for five hours a day, to intimate performance-rituals in which you experience 'kinetical emphaty'. in the most direct way possible: via your own body.
Your movements can become part of the Motus Mori archive for human movement. Via a movement-interview you can become a movement-donor.
Click here for more information and to plan an interview
Step 1
In each city, we start a new movement-archive by observing, learning and sharing. Our dancers conduct movement-interviews with many residents to add their most personal gestures to the archive and spark connections across bodies and stories.
Step 2
Working with dancers, movement-donors and local collaborators, we invent new methods to keep transmitting these movements from body to body. The archive is not filmed, photographed or recorded: it exists in our bodies, memories and stories.
Step 3
We come back to each city to transform the ever-growing archive materials and create new artworks: exhibitions, installations, intimate rituals and large public space manifestations.
Connecting people
We start each city-archive by interviewing local residents, who donate their personal movements and the stories they trace in their body. By contributing to the archive, movement-donors become connected with the everyday movements of thousands of others. We then transform the archive into a city-wide monumental ritual owned by community members who keep it going year after year.
Which movement would you like to donate and inherit?
Transforming space
In each city, we investigate the places that are meaningful to local residents. From contemplative museum settings to shopping malls, train stations and public squares, we inhabit these spaces with bespoke manifestations of the archive that become part of the memories of the city.
What moves your city?
Participating cities