During GraSED,

Conversation 1 – locate a memory

we created a little tent and pondered on what felt so safe about it; then deemed it as something that connected us both to our childhoods. merel related it to the softness of the red couch which is a nostalgic object from her childhood home, and allium related it to the encapsulating branches of the willow tree outside their childhood home. we both focused on positive, warm memories.

video transcript: 

(10s of silence)

m: time is non-existent for me, within the memories. I don’t age. I don’t know what the time difference is between those memories. and so, what is always this one consistent thing is the red couch. I can feel myself almost falling into the couch, and being surrounded, because the pillows were so soft- 

a: almost swallowing you?

m: it would swallow me whole, and it would actually feel like a hug. it would always feel warm, and then, now that i’m saying this, the house always had warm colours. My memory has made it a spatial element, darkness and lightness, when it’s in fact not spatial (but emotional)

what i find interesting, also within my research, is that I did come to the conclusion that time also needs to feel like a hug in order to comfort you. And I find it very interesting and obvious that it keeps coming back up in conversation, so I definitely want to dig further into what it is that made this couch represent a hug, what are the elements I can use for this?

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a: It keeps coming back to the willow tree outside my house, not necessarily the house itself. I associate most of my childhood with spring. Not the warmth, I guess, but just a very bright light coming through, there’s still a breeze, the branches move, and it’s like a very fluid space.

You can see it (the tree) from my childhood room, so also the sound, to me, of trees in the wind, feels like home. 

Leaving the house, which sounds insane, kind of felt like a relief, and then the tree is there.

m: have you ever heard the sound before, somewhere else?

a: not directly, not the same.

i think it’s also a tree that my parents hated. they would always complain to the municipality to have the branches cut. it’s very symbolic to me. 

it’s something like a defiance. 

I think using the elements is interesting to me, kind of translating my memories through tree branches moving. The sensorial experience it gave me as like, a driving force, but also calmness and a constant. 

Conversation 2 – model your memory

Conversation 3 – Translate your memory into a spatial group installation

this will be highlighted in its own post