Sometimes things get accidentally lost and never show up again.

The act of vanishing: we are all searching for something to be grasped, if not is lost forever.
There is a game that Freud describes as: “Children making things disappear and reappear, over and over, again”, as if they are practicing the experience of loss.

Lost accidentally deals with theme of loss and being lost. On how the different experiences related to “lost” affect us. On an individual and personal level and how we, as a society, are affected. We are under the threat of deletion – not just by death- by simple means of forgetting or being forgotten. It’s the constant dialectic between permanency towards irreversibility. The sense of loss and deletion it’s the manufacture of absence. It’s the reconstruction of the moment when everything went wrong. It’s a peaceful space, it’s allowing the unexpected, it’s a before facing an after. Lost is not just a personal material thing -the object that slipped from our pocket. It’s the irreversible changes of our personal life and society and our inadequacy of facing those changes. Starting to say something in a conversation and deciding to remain silence instead. It’s like erasing.

There is a sense of failure in every day human endeavor, exemplar of the ephemerality, and even the vulnerability, of our lives and of ‘performativity’ itself. The precariousness of our situation as beings. How do we deal with everyday simple vanishing acts? The collection of personal and humankind memories of being lost, of lost acts and failures might confront us with a nostalgic reality of our world: “something” that we wish was there. As if our life could be revealed through a series of lost (and truly found) moments.

Vanishing collection: We are collecting personal answers, stories, lists, poems, pictures related to the theme of loss, in every day human endeavour. Loss as failure, as deletion, as absence and presence. The intention is to create a performance that talks to us and about us, a collective “us” made of memories, and associations, of all people that will contribute in the project.

“It must be nice to disappear/To have a vanishing act/To always be looking forward/And never looking back”. (Lou Reed, Vanishing Acts)

Notes

lost cause
you’ve lost me
get lost
no love lost
lost in translation
lost time
not all those who wander are lost

‘It’s not lost, you’re just not looking properly!’

Every moment contains what came before, through responding or reacting to it, through ignoring it.  I dwell on things I shouldn’t.  I forget things I shouldn’t.  I enjoy the constant state of becoming, the impossible sense of stillness and stasis as the world turns and your body crumbles and then…gone.  Ha!  That sounds so miserable.  I dwell on stuff.  And I don’t.  I’m ok with those contradictions…

Not being able to remember where something is can cause my anger to rise so quickly. Anger at myself, but often a sense that it is about others.
As if someone else has taken something.
When something is lost, my external order is breaking down to chaos. I have wasted something. It’s trying to catch those wisps of smoke, the memories that will help me to visualize where I’ve placed things. I retrace my thinking, slowly re-playing my doing, like I’m accessing some ‘other’ part of my brain. And the joy of finding!  All is well.
Until it begins again!

Items that are lost are just not there anymore. I don’t get attached to items. Does losing something mean that you possessed it in the first place?
When is something actually lost? If it is found again, was it ever really lost? There is a permanency attached to the word lost.

I lost a toy Cheetah when I was 5 years old. Years afterwards, I still had recurring dreams about looking for it and a phrase kept coming back to my mind: “Nothing is really lost until your Mum cannot find it!”

What is the story of the object after it gets lost? Where is it, where does it travel? What does it think? Or desire? The story of the object doesn’t
stop once it gets lost. We just forget tell that story.

I had my birthday party with my friends and they gave me presents. But I forgot them when I went home. Few days later one of my friends gave it back to me. Presents were not lost, but my friends were very angry.

The Lost interview tapes, featuring Jim Morrison
Paradise Lost -  John Milton
Paradise Lost Trilogy – Documentary
“The Lost weekend” by Billy Wilder

I do not remember the word ‘’delete’’ being so popular before.
You could not delete what you’ve wrote. It still would be there, as a dirty mark on the paper.
You could not delete a picture. You’d spend lot of time deciding the right exposition, and then waiting for the film to be developed.
You could not delete a friend. It’s scary how “deleting” became a normal part of our lives.

I often experience a desire to disappear. A sensation to melt / merge
into to the surroundings. Or just to leave – to never come back. It
feels comforting in a way.

My fear of being lost and disappearing is a feeling of life
being meaningless. I guess for me it would be enough to know that I’m appreciated by just one person that matters to me.

I’m terrified of getting lost physically. Even though I lived in the same
town for two years, I get lost just going to school. I don’t know how
this can happen and maybe that makes me afraid.

The concept of fear of death is my answer to all.

You scroll past 400 wonderful lives on your Facebook wall and wonder if you’re not making the most out of yours. What will I be remembered for? I wish not to die on a day where you felt you hadn’t finished what you’d started.

It’s amazing how quickly you can be forgotten.

I feel I never knew my grandfather, that odd person, knowing nothing of my teenage interests. Talking loudly and rising his firm fist, as a sign to say “we’ll withstand” every time when saying goodbye. Cancer got him in 2 months. Last what I remember: me bringing him a chair to the elevator, as he could not stand anymore. He lifted his fist, sitting on the chair while lift’s door closed. 

A couple of years earlier, my mum died – she was 87, and had been ill for some time so, although it was very sad, it was no tragedy.  My older brother and sister and I cleared her house. I was in her bedroom, carefully dismantling, screw by screw, her wardrobe.  It was a cheap one, from the 1980’s.  My brother came in and told me that it would take too long if we did it like that.  So he took a hammer and knocked the side out of the wardrobe.  I kicked a door of it.  It was cathartic.  We only kept small things of my mum’s – I have her engagement ring, which is worn away.  I also have a small whisky glass that belonged to my dad.  I use it regularly.