connected memories

By María Mencía

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. To represent the fractured realities and the formations of connected memories, the viewers need to interact with the piece by clicking on the color-activated common keywords. 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.

In Mencía’s powerful work, simple words appear on a white background. Readers can click on them and snippets of stories appear, float around, spin and turn, and finally disappear. The visual disintegration of the stories mimic their oral beginning; these are stories that are seldom told and seldom heard. The same words call up different people’s recollections becoming nodes that link countries, religion, and ethnicity. The cultural shifts that are the products of immigration are revealed through these experiences of violence, discrimination and hardship in the home countries and the adopted home, Britain.