anti-memorial design: a collective effort
A Tube of Blood for Home is a multimedia installation that combines a variety of gestures, including photographic projection, video collage, ambient sound, and analog photography on fabric. White chiffon, luggage, tracing papers, fishline, and pedestals are among the other materials used. This project addresses translocality, hospitality, and contrasting views of exiles from multiple perspectives, based on my own experiences of rupture, dislocation, and confusion during my journey of homecoming during the COVID19 pandemic.
According to James Young’s book At memory’s Edge, counter-monument and anti- memorial “thus floated a number of memorial conventions: its aim was not to console but to provoke; not to remain fixed but to change; not to be everlasting but to disappear; not to be ignored by its passerby but to demand interaction; not to remain pristine but to invite its own violation; not to accept graciously the burden of memory but to throw it back at the town’s feet.”
With no goal of being a forced and unpleasant experience, this project sculpts the gallery into a counter-narrative that speaks of the exiles' constraint, bewilderment, dread, and placelessness as they try to cross borders to return home during a public crisis. I hope that this imagined space can meander out into the public domain, therefore as an extension of this multimedia project, I've also built a communal (anti-)memorial (not-yet-actualized) that includes more voices from people who have experienced homecoming ruptures.