Daniel Oduntan: Working Memory

Working Memory is a live, two-part performance by Daniel Oduntan with the Audio Visual Ensemble. The work explores the phenomenon of phantom amnesia: the slow disappearance of memory and place through spatial regeneration, content overload and the way stories are repeatedly edited, compressed, or removed of context.

Drawing from the world of library music for television, film as well as song composition and improvisational methods, the performance treats sound and image as tools for cataloguing memory in motion. Rather than presenting a single narrative, Working Memory operates as a live happening, where fragments are gathered, tested, and recomposed in real time. Improvisation becomes a method for preservation, allowing new timelines to emerge.

Across two movements, the ensemble moves between personal recollection, collective experience, and unfinished archives. The work asks how memory deteriorates, lapses; how we participate in that erosion through daily media consumption, and how live performance might offer a way to supplement this process, cultivating spaces for new audio visual languages.

Daniel Oduntan is supported by the Assembly Residency opportunity, a 12-month programme for emerging artists shaped by Somerset House Studios in collaboration with artist mentors Beatrice Dillon and Elaine Mitchener.