Co-written by Sydney Green and Alina Burke

Direction by Irina Kruzhilina

Developed May 2024

How do we remember ourselves? In Subterranean Memories, an immersive site-specific devised and staged in the once sculpture studio of the Westbeth artist complex in New York City. This piece deals with the emotional, political and social reverberations of disappearance.

Subterranean Memories invites the audience on an immersive journey to a desolate no-man’s land in a distant future, where inhabitants wait for the end to come. Following a catastrophic disaster, a resilient community has established itself in the basement of an abandoned, artist complex for a hundred years. What binds these people as a community is their commitment to preserving their memories of certain things, concepts, and rituals that defined the old world and are now being replicated in the new one. The audience is welcomed to observe a moving memory ritual, as residents showcase remnants of the past era that have ceased to exist in their current world—a world stripped of handwriting, theater, birthday parties, weddings, human kindness, and seasons.