Back to the Present

Memories are fleeting, trash remains forever.

In 2003, Constanza Macras and her company Dorky Park created the now legendary piece Back to the Present in the abandoned department store in Jandorf. Now, more than 20 years later, Back to the Present is coming to Gorky — to a new location and with everything that has happened in the meantime.

Where do you go if you want to flee from reality, don't want to deal with the past or the future? You go to bed. Or you go into the opposite of reality: a reality show! In Back to the Present, singles who have just become meet at a casting for such a show. Here they try to remain completely themselves and at the same time leave themselves behind in order to become archetypes for a mass audience.

But they can't get rid of their past. Fetishized objects from previous relationships build up like debris under a mountain of debris. They are abandoned and want to finally get rid of the things that constantly remind them of their past. But how do you recycle things that never decompose: love letters, flags, old props, old ideas? And when history becomes increasingly digital: Will we get rid of anything at all?

Back to the Present asks how capitalist exploitation logic colonizes even the most intimate spaces — and at the same time celebrates everything that eludes selling out. In doing so, the work itself becomes part of its own story: costumes, props, memories and traces of their first performance meet a new present more than twenty years later. People have moved on with their lives, the world has changed — and Back to the Present returns to meet themselves once again.

This return marks the beginning of a new collaboration: Back to the Present is Constanza Macras and Dorky Park's first work on Gorky. Further joint work will follow in the coming seasons.