Lois Keidan is the co-founder and Director of the Live Art Development Agency in London, and a member of the Advisory Board of Contemporary Theatre Review. The Live Art Development Agency advocates for Live Art in the UK and Europe, advises artists, institutions, and curators, and publishes books and DVDs on and by Live Art practitioners.
This is an act of memory about an act of memory.
I had the pleasure of knowing Monica Ross since the late 1980s, when I became immersed in the world of performance art through my work at Midland Group, Nottingham; the Arts Council England; and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Monica was one of the most politicised, uncompromising yet generous artists I’ve ever known – an artist who used all the active ingredients of performance art – presence, process, and participation – to create complex, experiential, and socially engaged works whose impact registered in all kinds of ways. At home in the gallery, on the street, in a range of charged locations, on the page, or the screen, her practice set out all kinds of possibilities for what performance could be and what embodied actions could do.
I want to remember Monica, here, in relation to one particular body of work, Anniversary – an act of memory, which took the form of a series of recitations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) from 2005 until her death in 2013. There are no big theories here, in my writing about this work – but, rather, a personal account of an extraordinary project by an extraordinary artist.
In 2006, the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) were Queen Mary University of London’s cultural sector partners on that year’s Performance Studies international (PSi) conference – Performing Rights – which focused on the inter- sections of performance and human rights. The artistic programme we curated, in dialogue with the conference, set out to reflect the kinds of creative strategies artists were using to effect social, cultural, and political change; to illustrate new models of relationships between art and activism; and to consider the role and responsibilities of artists, curators, and performance itself, in the understanding, enactment, and sustenance of human rights. It was a no-brainer that we should invite Monica Ross to revisit a work she had made in 2005, Rights Repeated – An Act Of Memory. In that year, in response to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by the police at Stockwell Station, she had decided to try and learn the UDHR by heart and she first attempted to publicly recite it from memory in Beaconsfield’s Chronic Epoch season. For Performing Rights, Monica performed Rights Repeated in the chapel at Queen Mary, and then at Tramway in Glasgow when we were invited to present a mini-version of Performing Rights for the annual National Review of Live Art in 2008.
From Rights Repeated, Monica developed Anniversary – an act of memory. The work was first presented at the British Library in 2008 to mark the 60th anniversary of the UDHR during the exhibition Taking Liberties: The Struggle for Britain’s Rights and Freedoms1. Anniversary was a series of solo and collective recitations in 60 acts performed by Monica and hundreds of co-reciters that took place between 2008 and 2013 within a vast range of communities and contexts, and in over 50 languages, including endangered, Indigenous, and sign languages. Always the same but always different, there were recitations on World AIDS Day, Martin Luther King Day, and International Women’s Day. There were recitations at performance festivals, within operas, in museums, libraries, universities and, community centres. There were recitations with refugees, artists, activists, children, and choirs. There were recitations in England, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, Germany, and Switzerland. The final recitation, Act 60, was performed at the 23rd session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland on 14 June 2013 – the day that Monica died.
In 2010, Monica and her then-producer Jason E. Bowman proposed that LADA publish a DVD series of film and photographic documentation of Acts 01-30, as part of our open call DVD on-demand series. This was exactly the kind of proposal we’d prayed for with the series – a beautifully conceived document of a hugely significant body of work, that in and of itself demanded to be seen by wider audiences, and which understood performance as a ‘generative medium’, and the new forms and strategies through which its ideas could be more widely and accessibly disseminated. As with everything else she did, Monica worked tirelessly and meticulously, editing and orchestrating the massive amount of material she had accumulated of and around the project for its new life as a DVD. We published acts of memory 2005–2010 in 2011 and it continues to be one of our most popular and influential titles.2
In 2010, I was asked to say a few words about the project and the relationships between performance and human rights as part of the Act 30 collective recitation in King’s College London Chapel during the College’s Inside Out Festival, which invited the public to think about the ways violence and memory affect our lives.
I talked about the different Live Art contexts in which the UDHR ‘lives’ – about artists whose practice is driven by ideas of social and environmental justice such as the vacuum cleaner and other anti-capitalist activists; about artists whose work playfully confronts issues of human rights, like Richard DeDomenici who created a boy band with asylum seekers to influence teenage girls’ attitudes to refugees (Fame Asylum, 2006); about artists who embody the lived experience of human rights violations, like La Pocha Nostra’s rituals around post 9/11 body politics; and about artists who were working with the material form and declamatory content of the UDHR itself, like LEIBNIZ whose The Book of Blood: Human Writes (2006) invited audiences to donate a single drop of blood each with which to write one letter from the UDHR; and, of course, Monica Ross, and her internalization of the UDHR and her attempts to recite it from memory as a collective act. That evening, Acts of Memory was performed by artists, lawyers, scholars, curators, campaigners, and community activists. Against the background of escalat- ing global injustices, and with the impact of the new UK Conservative Government hitting hard at home, each and every article of the UDHR was charged in a way I hadn’t experienced before, and I felt the urgency of this work, and the potency of Monica’s commitment to ‘embody a struggle for personal and public memory and the attainment of human rights as a continual process of individual and collective negotiation and re-iteration’.3
My next encounter with the project was equally charged. It was Act 37, a collective recitation performed at LADA’s then base, Rochelle School in Shoreditch, London in 2011, for Platforma’s Counterpoint Festival of work by and about refugees. That evening the UDHR was recited entirely by migrants in their native languages, in an overwhelming powerful embodiment of Counterpoint’s intention to ‘explore Edward Said’s idea that through their simultaneous awareness of different realities, exiles, refugees and migrants can create a uniquely plural vision of society, questioning the notions of objective reality and suggesting new ways forward’.4
Until today, my most recent encounter with Anniversary – an act of memory. was no less charged, but in different ways. It was on Saturday 14 June 2014, when we hosted a collective recitation by Monica’s friends and family in our new base at The White Building in Hackney Wick, London, to mark the first anniversary of both Monica’s death and the culmination of the project at the United Nations in Geneva.
Anniversary – an act of memory was an extraordinary project and one that I feel privileged to have been associated with, in some small way, since 2006, as curator, commentator, publisher, host and, best of all, witness. It was a project that represented everything that Live Art can do and can achieve – the strategies artists can use to effect social, cultural, and political change, to create new relationships between art and activism, and to test the role art can play in the understanding and enactment of human rights.
Acts of Memory was not art about politics, but was in itself an act of politics. On her death, Monica’s partner Bernard G. Mills wrote: ‘The sixty performances may have reached their conclusion as a series but it is a sincere hope that others may be encouraged and inspired to continue the endeavour to promote human rights throughout the world and if using Anniversary – an act of memory as a model or template, Monica would be only too delighted’. I know that many others do continue the endeavour, encouraged and inspired by the things Monica Ross made possible. She is a much missed artist, but her influence and impact lives on in an act of memory, and for this work alone she will never be forgotten.
1. British Library, ‘Taking Liberties: The Struggle for Britain’s Rights and Freedoms’ <http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/takingliberties/index.html> [accessed 25 March 2015].
2. Unbound <http://www.thisisunbound.co.uk/index.php> [accessed 25 March 2015].
3. ‘Recitations’, acts of memory <http://www.actsofmemory.net/> [accessed 2 April 2015].
4. ‘Counterpoint Multidisciplinary Event’, Platforma, 25 November 2011 <http://platforma.org.uk/events/counterpoint-multidisciplinary-event> [accessed 14 April 2015].
Lois Keidan is the co-founder and Director of the Live Art Development Agency in London, and a member of the Advisory Board of Contemporary
‘Monica Ross: An Act of Memory’ was originally written by Lois Keidan and published in Contemporary Theatre Review, 25.2 (2015), 288-91, reprinted by permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis Ltd.