Geology of the Real

Geology of the Real investigates the act of public memory recall through the lens of an evolving oral archive. Moving across performance, oral history, speculative writing, and material practice, the project challenges the control of memory in an era of political erasure and automation.

Working with techniques from oral tradition and spatial mnemonics, Eszter Némethi explores performance-as-listening to think through the School of Magical Politics archive (a body of interviews with artists, social scientists and journalists on politics, magic, and pedagogy).

The research is driven by the figure of the Oracle, a pragmatic "Oracle in Training" from the underworlds of the Carpathian basin who, with little interest in the future, is summoned to difficult speech by the need to reveal the real.

The Oracle operates on a geological logic of deep non-linear time where narratives sediment, the topsoil of the real is fragile, and fiction is a way of digging. She is both an investigative tool and a performative figure, exploring recall as an unstable, political act. She reads the archive, its stories, landscapes, and materials for the knowledge they hold, aided by tactile mnemonics and the presence of an audience. The research thus proposes embodied and situated practice as a form of resistance and collective re-authorship.

The work asks: What does it mean to remember in public? How does the act of recalling create meaning? And what happens when memory loses its ground?