Mémoire will be a 4-channel video + 4-channel audio immersive installation concerned with how women navigate the gendered terrain between aurality and visuality as they construct their selfhoods.
In this project I bear witness to the personal narratives of eight individuals who have defined themselves with sound and image across multiple contexts of femininity. I will ask them to consider a change in their habitat or in how they inhabit their body, and then answer the question:
“How did that migration or transformation change how you felt heard and seen?”
As I listen to them answer my question, I make a binaural audio recording of their voice (captured from their own ears) and a video recording of their eyes (as they make eye contact with me). I edit the content minimally and the respondents sometimes answer in languages other than English or in multiple languages that I do not understand. A collage of these recordings is set with a soundscape response to my listening experience.
Mémoire is made possible by the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Multi-Disciplinary Fellowship and with the support of MIT’s OpenDocLab.
A 2-channel proof-of-concept (password is “memoire”) with Fen Rotstein and nika.
Spanish-language captions by Daniel Szabo: