Digital book (2024)
Dis-Place is a performative archive of trace, instruction, and remembrance: memory not recorded, but re-enacted.
Project Statement
Dis-Place is a performative archive of memory and trace.
It gathers fragments from 33 homes lived across four continents, each one distilled into an artefact and a score. Rather than recording the past, it offers invitations to re-perform memory, transforming absence into presence, displacement into an act of making
Created as an online book, Dis-Place interweaves drawings, texts, and performance scores to explore how memories are kept alive through artefacts. Each score does not aim to recreate the past, but instead opens a space for readers to generate their own experience, becoming participants in the re-performance of memory
The work asks what remains when a performance or a moment has passed. By treating sketches, instructions, and even re-enactments as living traces, Dis-Place shows how memory and performance are never truly gone, they shift, adapt, and resurface in new forms.
Through its 33 artefacts, the archive highlights the delicate balance between impermanence and materiality. Memories are transient, yet each reader’s engagement creates new traces, new performances, new proofs of being.
In this way, Dis-Place resists closure. It becomes not only an archive of past homes but also a living practice of re-making, where memory belongs to the present as much as to the past.
Audience Response
“This is a creatively ambitious and imaginative conception of an archive that demonstrates the depth of your research and willingness to take risks.”
“Wow, this a truly engaging work which plays with memory, image, text, and instructional scores… has the
potential to grow into a collaborative project with other people contributing their work to build an communal archive of memory.”
Future iterations
Dis-Place is not a closed archive but a living one. Future iterations may include new artefacts, live re-performances, and collaborative expansions, each encounter generating further traces. The work grows through repetition and return, carrying memory forward in ever-shifting forms.
Leah M. Bowie 