Rationale for The Memories Project

Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.

- From the television show The Wonder Years

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

- Michel de Montaigne

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We spend our whole lives making memories. We learn from and are shaped by our past experiences. Without memories we would make the same mistakes over and over, and would never progress and grow.

Some memories give us great pleasure to examine again and again, and we want to hold onto these forever. We want them to remain sharp, and never deteriorate with time.

Some memories cause us pain to recall, but we are not sorry to have them because the experiences made us better people.

Some memories hold us back. We wish that they could be permanently erased from our minds so that we could stop torturing ourselves with them and move on.

I plan to explore the idea of preserving memories that people want to keep, and disposing of memories that people want to forget. I plan to involve others in my project, and build up a collection of memories to be preserved forever and memories to be disposed of.

I have been looking at wrapping and binding, and the way it is used for both preservation and disposal. I plan to incorporate this into my project by binding the memories – the good ones so that they can be preserved, and the bad ones so that they can be disposed of.

I plan to destroy the bad memories by burning them, but I feel that binding them first is symbolic. In religions such as Wicca, binding is used to prevent somebody or something from causing harm. Thus I am binding the bad memories to keep them from causing further pain.

The final piece will consist of the bound (preserved) good memories and the ashes of the burned bad memories.

I am excited about this project, and hope that as I follow it through, I will learn more about the nature of memory as well as traditions of binding and wrapping.

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