Constanza Macras, Dorky Park Back to the Present

Memory is fragile, garbage lasts forever.

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

Where do you go when you want to escape reality, when you don’t want to confront either the past or the future? You go to bed. Or you go to the opposite of reality: a reality show! In Back to the Present, newly single people meet at an audition for such a show. Here they try to remain completely themselves while at the same time leaving themselves behind in order to become archetypes for a mass audience.

But they can’t shake off their past. Fetishized objects from past relationships pile up like debris beneath a mountain of rubble. They’ve been 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 decay: love letters, flags, old props, old ideas? And as history becomes increasingly digital, will we ever be able to let go of anything at all?

Back to the Present explores how capitalist logic of exploitation colonizes even the most intimate spaces—while at the same time celebrating everything that resists commodification. In the process, the work itself becomes part of its own history: costumes, props, memories, and traces of its first performance encounter a new present more than twenty years later. People have gone on with their lives, the world has changed—and Back to the Present returns to encounter itself once again.

This return marks the beginning of a new collaboration: Back to the Present is the first work by Constanza Macras and Dorky Park at the Gorki. Further collaborative works will follow in the coming seasons.