Embodied Landscape (2020)

Embodied Landscape is a web-based interactive extension of the video performance of the same name. The project reflects on the history and memory of Buffalo’s lost Marble Temple, the former headquarters of M&T Bank building. Built in 1913, the four-story structure was renowned for its white marble interiors before being demolished in 1959. Today, fragments of the building remain in two locations: partly incorporated into memorials at Baird Point on the University at Buffalo’s North Campus and also scattered throughout Wilkeson Pointe Park at Buffalo’s Outer Harbor.

The interactive work invites visitors to click on images of individual marble fragments to activate short narrated texts. These narrations consist of poems and personal reflections written in response to the performance. The recordings can be played individually or simultaneously, producing a changing chorus of voices that rearranges the poetic text with each interaction.

By choosing which stones to activate, and in what order, the viewer moves from passive observer to active participant in reconstructing the building’s fragmented memory. Each sequence creates a different combination of voices, reflecting the way memory is itself fragmentary, layered, and continually reshaped through recollection. The overlapping recordings also give the scattered marble fragments a collective voice, suggesting that the lost building can be reimagined through multiple encounters. Through its interactive structure and shifting arrangement of poetic fragments, the project embodies a living, participatory archive of images that reflects on memory, absence and the afterlife of place.

Click here to open the project app

Credits:

concept and art direction: Maryam Muliaee
narration: Khodja Sy
narrator: Dana Venerable
music: Ethan Hayden
programing: Mani Mehrvarz
support: The University at Buffalo’s Arts Collaboratory and M&T Ban