PEER REVIEW

​

Your piece is highly stimulating for the senses. Indeed visual images build up on recorded interviews and vice versa, awakening memories and thoughts in the audience. The soundscape drew my interest and I heard other members of the audience laughing and reacting to the interviews. Also the images have a very strong power to make the audience identify especially because many of them are actually recognizable, and many others are still familiar being shot in cities and towns around Europe. Projection time could last even longer than five minutes, being the audience drawn to the projected photos and their running thoughts. 

The absence of the performer is key to the piece, making the audience focus even more on the visual and audio material and less on someone else’s actions. The presence of a spotlight really works well, showing the absence of the performer, and giving a physical space and light to the people speaking in the interviews. Furthermore the spotlight lights members of the audience who are watching the projections, making your performance about and made by everybody. Therefore this spotlight is a device through which the audience becomes aware of the universality of the pictures and stories recorded. Photography is a very effective way to make people empathize. Personally I recognised many of the pictures and I could also relate to some images that I had never seen before. Everyone has got photo galleries and albums of cities, museums, nature – taken during holidays or daily life and therefore your photos can speak to everybody in the audience.

Having seen two different versions of this performance – one with the presence of words projected on the screen together with the images instead of the soundscape in week 6, I believe that the combination sound-photos is more effective in stimulating imagination and memories in the audience than words-photos. Indeed with abstract words the audience spends some time wondering whether words are connected to the pictures and trying to find a link between the two visual elements rather than focussing on their universality and emotional resonance. However with sound and photos the link comes more naturally. Being the reason behind the order of photos undecipherable, unexpected connections between photos and memories are encouraged to happen in the audience. Showing a picture for multiple times throughout the piece might be a good idea to consolidate the audience’s sensations and thoughts.

In order to develop your piece and make it even more engaging to the audience, you could enhance its immersiveness, making the soundscape even louder and increasing the number of projections. Furthermore you could create a path through which the audience is encouraged to wander around moving between different screens. Indeed the use of many screens doesn’t distract the audience: by changing focus from one screen to another one a sense of movement is created and the audience can almost physically travel back to memories and experiences.