1.Project Description
Decoding the Tape is a performative research project that explores the fragile intersections between family memory, and state-controlled cultural production (of music and entertainment) in communist Romania. Through storytelling, gesture, and sound, the performance reconstructs an intimate history of music, revealing how entertainment, despite censorship and scarcity, remained a persistent source of resilience.
At the center of the stage stands a woman who performs a series of repeated actions: enters the space, confidently activates an old cassette player, listens briefly to the music, and then stops the tape with a strong, deliberate gesture. These movements are ritualistic—echoes of domestic habits passed down through generations, and at the same time a choreography shaped by ideological control over technology and music. As the scene continues, she crochets continuously, using magnetic tape. Crocheting becomes a metaphor for decoding: a slow, meticulous act of unravelling the past while weaving a new narrative in the present.
The performance begins with a propaganda song, establishing a frame that references Romania’s pre-1989 media landscape, a period when musical access was strictly filtered through state ideology. Television offered only a few hours of programming per day, mostly dedicated to socialist programmes, and foreign music was heavily censored. Still, people found inventive ways to listen: cassettes and magnetic bands smuggled in packages from abroad, recordings captured during rare radio broadcasts, tapes traded like currency among enthusiasts. These practices of quiet resistance form a crucial undercurrent of the performance, which treats music not simply as entertainment but as a subtle form of survival.
2. Concept and Motivation
The script is rooted in the family`s archive and oral history-particularly the figure of a grandfather who served as a “one-man show” at local gatherings, owning rare equipment that allowed him to record, mix, and share music at a time when such actions were rare. The narrative blends factual memory with speculation, acknowledging the gaps, distortions, and contradictions that emerge when stories are transmitted across generations. One inherited cassette-of uncertain authorship-becomes the symbolic core of the performance. No functioning cassette player could be found to listen to it, leaving its contents suspended between myth and truth. Rather than attempting to resolve this uncertainty, the performance embraces it, treating speculation itself as a valid form of documentation.
3. Artistic Approach
The performance unfolds in a sequence of acts, each delimitated by famous Romanian songs that mirror the shifting emotional and political landscape of the narrative.
While an audio recording is playing, the performer is crocheting, her gestures forming an embodied archive in which memory becomes tactile and audible at once. The cassette player on the shelf functions as both object and witness, a relic of time. The repetitive pressing of “play” and “stop” becomes a physical meditation on control and strictness.
By transforming an ordinary, partially indecipherable cassette into the starting point for a new narrative, the piece proposes that archives can also be emotional, speculative, and embodied. It foregrounds the persistence of cultural practices that survive political oppression and demonstrates how a family’s musical rituals-dancing, recording, listening-can carry forward across generations.
Ultimately, Decoding the Tape offers audiences a reflection on how memories degrade, transform, or survive, much like magnetic tape itself. The act of crocheting the tape becomes a way to decode not the sound itself, but its meanings, stories, and silences. Through this process, the performance weaves together historical context, personal mythology, and artistic imagination to reveal how the past can be unfolded, rewoven, and listened to anew.
4. Course Context and Setting
The lecture performance was conducted as part of the elective course Unboxing Stories, led by Sophie Lembke, during the Winter Semester 2025/2026. The performance took place at the DDS (Dessau Design Schau).
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