Marked for Disposal
performance for the 12th Vector Festival
flagship exhibition, 404_not_found
Curator: Dallas Fellini
Marked for Disposal is a performance for the 12th edition of Vector Festival, 404_not_found. Smythe stages an encounter with the anarchival—offering an embodied meditation on what cannot or should not be kept, and on the pain and power of being mis/remembered. Accompanied by a soundscape and score that hover between ghost transmission and sonic debris—tape hiss, glitches, analogue interference, and signal bleed—the performance asks what becomes of memory when documentation falters, and what beauty lingers in the absence of permanence.
Considering the broken promises of the digital and the dreams we seek to preserve, Marked for Disposal invokes whispered phrases, fragmented gestures, and a fractured soundscape to conjure a chorus of excessive, untraceable memory and the impossibility of complete documentation. The performance engages with works from Vector Festival’s 2025 flagship exhibition and disordered, decaying materials from InterAccess’s archive: floppy disks, administrative records, marginalia, Betamax tapes, and other half-collected ephemera. Smythe moves through this detritus as a living index of refusal, tracing lingering presence and kinship beneath institutional conditions.
Part elegy, part celebration, part warning, Marked for Disposal reflects on the fantasy of accumulated permanence in the wake of deaccession and disintegration—dwelling in decay, refusal, and the more-than-archivable.
Performance activation & sound composition – SA Smythe
Photo credit – tbc.
SA Smythe, PhD 