The Show Match that took place on the 16th of June 2024 shows two memory athletes, Katie Kermond and Don Michael Vickers, playing an altered version of a usual match.

In a regular competition, the categories in which the athletes are competing use randomly generated data as grounds to compare their memory capacities. Here, they are playing with emotional/personal data sourced from the athletes’ own lives. Such as birthdays of loved ones, pictures of known faces and locations, and words they use a lot in their daily life. The match was hosted and streamed live on Twitch in collaboration with Johannes Mallow, a two time memory world champion and an active ambassador for memory sports and the official and the Memory League, an online memory sports platform.

By inserting emotionally charged memories in the set framework that is usually more numerically rigid, the quantification processes of memory are disrupted and questioned.

Ferdinand Waas is an artist and facilitator. Through working via conversational methods with subcultures, communities and his personal periphery he tries to formulate works in the vocabulary of the subject and context. His work is based on encounters, conversations, recordings, acts of recalling and documentation through different ways of note-taking. By retracing and storytelling of the often invisible and mostly unseen, centring the considered niche, to decode as well as challenge norms and further question set standards.

The work developed through a collaboration with Johannes Mallow, Kathie Kermond, Don Micheal Vikers and Simon Orten. @johannesmallow @kkmemorise @dmvmemory @memoryleague

Graphic design by Lucy Gengler @lucy.gengler

Special Thanks to Hedda Grevle Ottesen, Samir Ljuma, Frans van Hoek, Hannah Schleifer, Baroeg Mulder, Lyy Riatala, Heidi Holmström, Anabel Pérez Lubián, Zeynep Yilmaz, Maria Ilieva, Anna Ueding, Theo Rudingsdorfer