Place in Memory I Memory in Place : re-membering the past

“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”

― Zadie Smith

I have come to understand remembering as a process, a narrative process of accumulation, modification and forgetting. Remembering is a process which belongs in the present.

The questions at the heart of my work are: how can I uncover places and events which are embodied  within this process of remembering? and, in turn, how can I reveal the process as an experience into which the viewer can enter?

My research is presented within the context of two core experiments. The first, Memory of loci, a Virtual Reality experiment for the HTC Vive. The second, The Chorus a Mixed Reality experiment in the Microsoft HoloLens. Both these experiments are connected through an online archive which I've spent ten years accumulating, an archive in development incorporating testimonies, images, videos and documents - all related to a village in northern Czech Republic, border to Poland, called Srbská, also referred to as Wünschendorf, which I lived in between 2007 - 2012. 

Once a thriving Sudeten village, After its residents were exiled in 1946 it fell to ruin, causing it to disappear almost entirely. My interest is to understand how Srbská / Wünschendorf exists in the stories of those who remember it, opening up its past as a spatial experience into which the viewer can enter.

Year

2017

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