Ruban, M., Lloyd, J., 2025.

Everything We Did: Perpetual Karaoke, Film, Archive, Performance, Exhibition

Selected by The UK National Archives as a 'Highlight of the Year in Archives, 2024', this research is focused on a recurrent project that investigates performative ritual as a mode of reframing fragmented memories and trauma as a way of repairing hope, a portal created to bring resilience. 
Time and archive are reimagined through the ritual of Perpetual Karaoke (Film, Archive, Performance and Exhibition); Everything We Did conjures sixteen weeks of 1991 into the present. Everything We Did invokes portals of popular culture, creating 'a social resource' (Drew, 2001), where anyone can become what that want to be. 
With a focus on the months of the collapse of the USSR and declaration of Ukrainian independence in 1991, the karaoke space becomes comparable to an active haunting, inviting the participants to create a 'collective bonding' (Pierce, Laurnay et al)  to reimagine and reinterpret the past, delving into 'Entangles Histories' and  'counter-factuals', (Shevel & Popova, 2023).
'What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate.' (Fisher 2012).
Participants are invited to join the ritual of the karaoke, which is inhabited by masked narrators, (as in Cindy Sherman's Play of Selves, 'alter-egos that compete inside the self'). There is only one song, the endurance and repetition conjure energies past and present.  These are recounted in testimonies which form the perpetual collection of cultural and historical reinterpretation through participation. These have included queer histories, Ukrainian personal accounts and archive reinterpretation. 
Everything We Did featured at the MeCCSA conference in September 2024 as a 9 hour performance, exhibition and film. This presentation is a reflection of this ongoing Perpetual Karaoke project.