Memory Fold
Memory Fold is a site-responsive series of artworks unfolding within the husks of abandoned buildings, spaces where the notion of home has eroded, shifted, or vanished entirely. These works engage with absence, with what remains after dwelling has ceased. In this context, the fold becomes more than a formal gesture: it is a method of remembering through material, a crease that holds the residue of presence.
Here, home is not a structure, but a fragile construct of memory. It is where intimacy meets erosion, where traces of domesticity linger in dust, shadow, and broken thresholds. The artworks do not reconstruct what once was. Instead, they fold the emotional architecture of home into the building’s decay, revealing how memory shelters itself in corners, objects, and gestures long after the inhabitants are gone.
These works act like memory folds: temporal wrinkles, material gestures that compress time
and feeling into form. Each artwork draws from the surrounding architecture, collaborating with broken floors, exposed beams, and weathered textures to animate the forgotten.
1. Echoes of Emptiness
Echoes of Emptiness is an augmented reality experience for the Heriscope project by Communitism.
2. Memory Code
The Memory Code is a browser-based visual loop that makes the act of forgetting tangible through the slow erosion and reformation of an image. A photograph of an abandoned family house gradually decays, not uniformly, but in shifting zones that flicker between clarity, distortion, and complete loss.
Inspired by the concept of race conditions in digital memory, unstable states where data becomes unpredictable, the work simulates three phases: ‘intact’, ‘recoverable’, and ‘lost’. These zones evolve independently, creating an ever-changing field of remembering and forgetting. Some areas vanish completely, while others reemerge, as if drawn from a fragile archive.
Rather than disappearing, the image becomes something else: fragmented, abstract, haunted. The Memory Code invites viewers to witness forgetting not as a moment, but as an ongoing, unstable process, echoing both the fragility of digital storage and the unreliability of human memory.
3. Nine Audience-Activated Performances in Abandoned Buildings
1. Listening
Sit silently in one spot with your eyes closed, listening to the ambient soundscape around you.
2. Sweep
Use a broom or stick to sweep slowly in a small area. Move dust gently without cleaning.
3. Open/Close
Open and close an existing or imagined door repeatedly and slowly.
4. Touch
Touch a surface lightly with part of your body (hand, forehead, shoulder). Shift slowly from one point of contact to another.
5. Whisper
Whisper the names of lost objects or people into the space. Then leave.
6. Draw
Draw a single straight line across a wall or floor using chalk or string. Sit beside it for a while.
7. Re/Enter
Walk in and out of a specific threshold repeatedly, without speaking. A folded loop of entry and departure, echoing absent routines of daily life.
8. Object Return
Place one small, familiar object (a spoon, a shoe, a mirror shard) inside the building. Leave it behind.
9. Sit/Stand
Alternate between sitting and standing at timed intervals in the same location. Maintain silence.
