Pest Laboratory

One difficulty facing the Forgotten Fish Memory Orchestra is in finding suitable locations in which to perform. They like to do site-specific work when possible and to that end they have designed shows for a laundromat, a geodesic dome, a monastery, a busy city ringroad at midnight, a wooden pier, a large church, a tiny ship etc. Each location presents its own challenges. For their performance ‘Pest Laboratory’, they were able to avail themselves of an old disused terrain which had previously been owned by the Ministry of Defense and had been the scene of some kind of animal experimentaion. There was a series of buildings, some with built-in cages, machines for who-knows-what, a ubiquitous smell of decay, animal waste, old grain, rusty metal, an atmosphereof post-war melancholy, 40’s technology, dim lights and a bestiary of victims. We don’t know what sinister transmogrifications the local scientific community had been busy with, the Fish Memory Orchestra transformed themselves from rubber-clad radiation-proof technicians into mummified brides. The transformation was aided by the use of primitive arc lights, a wind-up gramophone, 8mm film projections and a musical selection of tunes which progressively became slower and slower until it reached a stop-motion of white noise.