Abstract This contribution presents a new development of Performing Reflection, an artistic research practice that stages musical improvisation and improvised speech within a shared performative structure. Initially conceived as a way of making reflection-in-action audible during free improvisation, the practice has gradually shifted toward memory as a compositional and epistemic problem.

Drawing on oral traditions and the classical art of memory, it reconsiders forms of discourse structured without external writing. In both cases, extended forms are organized through cultivated mnemonic architectures—internal spatial or relational frameworks that enable recall and recomposition. Composition does not depend on fixed inscription but on structured internal navigation.

Developed within the research framework Spirits in Complexity, this work approaches memory not as storage but as relational encounter. Improvised recall does not retrieve intact content; it establishes contact with traces that persist within speech and sound, exposing how material is reshaped through its reactivation. Verbal and musical improvisation thus reveal distinct yet interconnected modes of mnemonic organization.

The presentation examines how such internal mnemonic systems can be reactivated within contemporary artistic research. In a cultural landscape shaped by optimization, narrative standardization, and externalized storage, artificial memory can be understood as an endangered conceptual practice. It proposes embodied mnemonic composition as a situated and resilient mode of organizing knowledge that foregrounds memory as structured encounter rather than archive.