Connected Memories

This piece is an exploration of oral histories and the use of technology as a participatory and inviting medium to perform and share stories.

It is an interactive piece, which consists of a series of extracts from interviews of refugees living in London and the connection between them. They are compiled in a database and linked by common key words. To represent the fractured realities and the formations of connected memories, the viewers need to interact with the piece by clicking on the coloured activated 'common keywords' in order to generate extracts of narrations from the different participating refugees. As an installation the piece includes a microphone to invite the viewers to read aloud and share with other viewers the experience of performing the work through their reading. 

As the reader explores and experiences the work by connecting the extracts from the narratives appearing in the screen, the fortuitous position of extracts produces new relationships, and in doing so, an on going process of meanings, connections and narratives; shifting from the semantic linguistic meaning to the visual, from the literal, the legible, the transparent to the abstract memory; and simultaneously creating a poetic space of readable and visual textualities. 

As with the oral storytelling tradition, in this work, the share of experiences happens at that moment in time. There is no recording facility; the text is in constant flux of becoming.

Some of the common key words used as links: war- escape- prison -money –government-refugee-passport –kill- documents- mother–father- family –airport-fear- help- country-asylum.