On November 24th, we are thrilled to launch the SONAR project at Reactor! "SONAR: Reactor for reinventing memory" was wonderfuly dreamed up by Ioana Hogman, who spent a consistent amount of time over the last few months chatting with our lovely audience members and brilliant artistic teams. They reminisced about the creative processes and performances of seven selected shows from the Reactor repertoire between 2014 and 2020. Read on below to find out more from Ioana herself about this fantastic project, which includes a podcast and a performative listening session!

There are several little seeds that planted the forest of this project as you see it today, but the initial spark was lit in the autumn of 2022 while I was attending the Autumn Curatorial School organized by the Cluj Cultural Centre—a truly intense and inspiring experience for me! That is where I discovered the practice of artist Nico Dockx, who works mostly with archives, a subject I had only briefly crossed paths with before. I can't recall the exact train of thought, but a spark flew while listening to him speak, and suddenly I found myself holding this beautiful idea in my arms: the Reactor archive. In that same creative bubble, I started asking myself questions about the micro-economy and micro-production of each project, wondering what resources I bring to a project and what each process generates for me. Looking at the bigger picture, I realized that every single time there is so much—so many resources and so much rich content discovered in a process that wraps up quickly and to which I might never return. I wondered what it would feel like to dedicate a whole year just to revisiting what I had already done (which sounds a bit scary, I admit!) to research what else I could create with it.

Getting back to SONAR, the very first idea—which I don't think I even shared with a single soul—was to invite everyone to revisit the shows to see if we could "restore" them. This would be contextualized in the present day, taking into account the time that has flown by since those productions and the beautiful personal changes that have occurred in everyone who took part in those processes. Over time, this idea evolved wonderfully, and what remained was a single, curious question that I posed both to the artists I interviewed for SONAR and to our amazing audience members. Other than that, I drifted into the affective, intangible zone—the place where I feel right at home knowing how to search and what to do with the treasures I find. And by placing the project within our festive anniversary context, it became absolutely essential to bring the audience on board in a big, joyful way!

I don't think I have a final, set-in-stone idea of what my role is at Reactor or in general. Without a doubt, SONAR is unlike anything I’ve ever done before, but it happily borrows a lot from the way I documented the re.adapt project and how I facilitate the Framework platform—both of which were direct seeds and inspirations for this project. If we were to borrow a label and playfuly twist its meaning, my role could be that of a mediator; that’s how I’ve been thinking of myself lately, no matter the subject or the medium I'm playing with.

However, unlike previous projects at Reactor, this time I felt a warm urge to take extra care in connecting what I do with the unique spirit of the space, in a genuine dialogue with the people here. For instance, the curation of the plays we talk about wasn't done by me, but by the very people who know best how they want to tell this story, because they've been here from the very beginning. No matter how alternative and subjective this history we are building is, it is the history of a space that represents so much more than just my personal perception of it, and one of my roles is to embrace this wonderful multitude! In this way, the first person whose relationship with Reactor was deeply transformed by the project was me. I saw it through so many eyes and heard it through so many voices, and every single experience I recorded added a layer I didn't know was there—maybe only vaguely sensed. It was just like starting with a little cabbage heart and happily adding leaves until it became whole. And purple!

Memory has been such a wonderful, playful working partner—both my own and everyone else's! I started out excited by its constructive nature rather than its reproducing one, which is why I deliberately chose not to watch video recordings or look at photos of the shows before we talked. I wanted to see what bubble up during a "cold extraction", how memories alter over time, and how they beautifully merge with the memories of others in the group. Of course, the process only partially looks like what I had imagined. But it is warm, human, and full of lovely surprises! One beautiful surprise was discovering that someone had actually been discretely, carefully, and lovingly taking care of the physical archive of the space—and that person is Oana Mardare! From that point of view, all I did was transfer files from one hard drive to another, half-fearing I might lose them in this archiving process—which would be a hilarious irony!

The structure of the podcast is delightfully simple, even though it will be a collage. Although we improvised a lot during the recording sessions—preferring to create cozy conversation spaces rather than formal interviews—the thread remains the same. I tried to understand what was meant to be shared from one side and what actually reached the other. In fact, even more than the artist's intention or the spectator's perception, I was fascinated by the magic potential of the space that forms between the two—a space where unexpected things can blossom for everyone involved! On top of that, we followed a timeline. I truly believe that stirring up the past is a wonderful way to inspire the present and the future, beyond just creating a history. What this intangible archive tells us about the future is, for me, just a tiny bit more exciting than what it tells us about the past—especially since each podcast episode also takes the pulse of Reactor in that specific year, set against the national and global socio-political landscape.

As for the performative listening session, I haven't quite decided on the material yet! The selection is wonderfully overwhelming and delightfully messy. In any case, it won't be the same as the podcast. This is a different setting with different needs, and right now I only have lovely fragments of ideas. I know I will start from the premise that, unlike the podcast—which we will all listen to individually in our own spaces—at the listening session we will be gathered together right between these four walls where "history" actually took place! The space is, therefore, physically stable, but I intend to playfully shake up its usual geometry during the performances. On top of that, the wonderful Oana Hodade will join me with a sound performance that I imagine will beautifully smooth out the fragmented times of the recordings and anchor us in a sweet sense of constancy. But that's not a certainty either—just as there aren't many certainties about how an independent art space works in Romania. Our relationship with the future, as I learned in this process, is a beautiful, continuous negotiation.

As for my own relationship with the future, I guess it’s a colorful mix! But looking through this very special lens of the performing arts, SONAR has delightfully confirmed some of the beliefs and intuitions I’ve always held about the magic that can happen inside a theatre or performance hall. We have a wonderfully generous platform at our disposal to practice within it many of the beautiful things we dream of for humanity!

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