random memo random is a video that depicts the same sequence for camera as a performance piece by the same name performed at the 3rd Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2016 and 2017. In the work, the artist contends with a 7-foot-deep hole in the ground that houses an unseen trampoline at the bottom. A wooden cabinet is drawn out of the hole on a slow, efficient pulley system, and when high enough, Sasamoto enters the hole. Once there, she begins jumping up and down, her head becoming momentarily and repeatedly visible above the parapet at ground level. She uses a simple cone as a megaphone to shout short sentences, perhaps the memo referred to in the title, until exhausted of things to say and from jumping. She climbs out and lowers the cabinet back into the hole.

The performance highlights the implicit social contract entered into by an artist and audience while also asking questions about the role of the museum, storage, archiving and bias. Aki Sasamoto’s work is always a mediation of the body and its movement through space. This work perhaps thinks through questions of lived experience in relation to the institutions that stratify us and asks; can the body itself be an archive? By embracing gestures that allude to these questions, and framing them in the context of a performance space of a gallery, their significance is heightened.