Using home movies, letters and personal videotapes from friends in different parts of the world alongside fragments of movies and news items, Instructions for Forgetting explores video as an artefact, as a container of image and memory and as an occasion for speculation, fiction and interpretation. Etchells and a video operator sit at their tables in a performance space containing three video monitors on which images are continuously rewound and narratives fast-forwarded. Etchells draws the letters and emails donated by friends into an intimate-essay that includes fact and fiction, death, murder, the soccer legend George Best, hospital experiments, amateur striptease and whale detonation.

Commissioned by Weiner Festwochen.

With Hugo Glendinning (video) and Richard Lowdon (design).