A Poem | A Performance Series (2024 – ongoing)

A poem and a series of performances exploring traces of memory and connection

Project Statement

Lines is a poem and performance series exploring memory as fragments, gestures, and traces. Emerging from the project Dis-Place, it moves between voice, silence, shadow, and repetition, creating a shared space where memory is not reconstructed but dispersed. Performed with ensembles and as solo video works, Lines engages themes of connection, migration, and rupture, inviting audiences into an intimate yet unsettled encounter with what remains between presence and absence.

Lines unfolds as a continuation of Dis-Place, where the archive of text scores begins to move, fracture, and breathe. While Dis-Place asks readers to re-perform memory to access its traces, Lines turns relations, patterns, and memory itself into gestures, voices, and repetitions. It is a work of becoming, where boundaries dissolve into the intervals between one word and the next, one step and the next.

At its core, Lines asks what remains between us: between words and silence, movement and stillness, anonymity and visibility.

The text that underpins the work is written as a fragmentary poem. In the performance, these fragments surface and recede like tidewater, sometimes whispered, sometimes broken by silence:

“What happened to the things that used to be mine?

Things that have been lost, displaced?

Do they still bear my fingerprints?

Can they remember?”

Each repetition of the text is a threshold: an invocation, a reminder, a dispersal. The poem refuses to become whole, yet it stitches together the absent and the present.

Relation to Other Works

In relation to the wider body of work, Lines is a continuation of Filters, another exploration of layering, distortion, and the fragile threshold between clarity and opacity. Where Filters unsettles perception through sonic and visual interference, Lines lingers in voice and memory as its medium of diffraction. Both works experiment with porousness, refusing to resolve into single, transparent meaning.

Fragments of Lines also became material for Achiamma, where they are woven into a wider diasporic and intergenerational constellation. In this sense, Lines functions as an autonomous score and a porous archive, an afterlife continually folding back into other works.

Audience Response

Audience members describe Lines as both intimate and unsettling:

“Your poetry is very strong and moving. Your visuals carry your unmistakable fingerprint… coherent and touching, simple yet powerful. I had goosebumps watching… Stay as authentic as you are – that is your strength and your uniqueness.” – Zurich, Switzerland, 2024

“A very exciting, impressive evening, so emotional, thought-provoking. I have never experienced a performance like this before.” – Zurich, Switzerland, 2024

Performances

Premiere: University of the Arts, Zurich, July 5, 2024, with the unfra-me ensemble:

Performers:

• Leah Muriel Bowie (concept, visuals, text)
• Andrea Maciel
• Dominique Regli-Lori
• Kristjan Kannukene
• Lone Aagot Meinich
• Nicole Pürro
• Shannon Murray

Mentors: Charlotte Hug and Rahel Zoë Buschor

Subsequent solo video performances were created and later re-used as material in Achiamma.

Lines can be performed by one to eight performers and adapted to different spaces and settings.

Trailer

Video: Tae Peter | Leonie Berger | Leah Muriel Bowie