Free Muscle Memory is a participatory performance at Lucky Larry’s Cosmic Commune, during the International Design Biennial in St. Etienne, 2017.
Free Muscle Memory was a three day participatory performance dressed-up as a workout, inviting visitors to train their minds to memorize and familiarize the movements of utilizing power tools. The participants will acquire the choreography of these power tools, and try-out their gained knowledge into producing two simple modules.
“(…) In this workout we will train the movements of cutting, drilling, sawing. After having memorized the movements, we’ll start building together, as part two of the workout, to form a muscular bond, as described by historian professor William H. McNeill in his book Keeping Together in Time – Dance and Drill in Human History. Muscular bonding is the euphoric fellow feeling that occurs when rhythmic movements arouses nearly all the participants in an exercise.”
Unknown for the participants is that they are utilized as free labor forces that produce bulk, which will later – once shipped to the Netherlands – be assembled into a twelve meter long bench exhibited as an ‘act of failed radicalism’.
Free Muscle Memory plays on the forming of a group and enhancing the sense of self by offering concrete skills for abstract purposes.
