Simone Salvo

What is the medium of memory? In this 7-week studio, we will dig into this question through creative, lens-based storytelling. This class will introduce traditional and bleeding-edge documentary methods to inform our own approaches to activating archival material, exploring:

• how interventions on found materials–and its inverse–redaction, can surface possibilities for alternative narratives;
• how techniques like reenactment, AR, and speculative forms of new production can make visible unrecorded histories or call into question the power dynamics embedded in official records; and
• how we might recast objects and sites of memory-keeping, like heirlooms, journals, and memorials, as a mode of engaged preservation.

Mid-way through the course, students will identify either personal or collective histories to open up to their own individual creative reexamination, memorialization, or transformation–each producing a final project with the technology and approaches of their choosing that serves to answer the question we started with: what is the medium of memory?