A PROSTHETIC MEMORY DEVICE

In my process of exploring memory, I construct a kind of aide-mémoire—literally, a device to aid remembering. This tool for recollection is, as French historian Pierre Nora might say, my own prosthetic memory, a way of engaging with technologies of remote communication: video calls, but also recording technologies, and later, the manipulation and sharing of these materials with others.

I explore certain formal and conceptual possibilities to create a piece that is both playful and metaphorical, incorporating elements that are activated to immerse us in a world of estrangement, emerging from my own subjectivity. 

This subjectivity is shaped, among other things, by a collection of phone conversations I’ve had with my mother, who lives in a faraway country, which I’ve recorded and sonically manipulated. Faced with a fragmented conversation defined by distance, aging, repetition, and forgetting, my strategy seeks to make sense of this chaotic and diverse material archive.