Recent Update 12/10

Beneath the Basement is an installation that extends from a fundamental shift in how I understand memory. In my writing, I compare memory to an archive—not as a library, a storage system, or a database, but as an internalized cognitive structure. This “archive” is a logic we inherit and reproduce: a mechanism of linearity, consistency, and coherence that allows us to survive the chaos of lived experience. As someone shaped by diaspora, I relied on this archival logic to compress displacement, fragmented histories, and unstable emotions into orderly narratives—stories that felt “true” only because they allowed me to keep functioning.

Yet the events of 2024 forced this logic to collapse. Family stories contradicted themselves. My father’s message arrived like an official document—emotion transformed into a taxonomic account. My grandmother’s Alzheimer’s dismantled chronology altogether, revealing a form of memory that was no longer indexical or linear but drifting, porous, and unbound. Suddenly, the stable archive I used to depend on could no longer hold.

From this rupture emerged the central recognition behind the work:
Memory is not a record of the past. Memory is a negotiation with the present.
We rewrite it constantly—not to lie, but to survive. Each version is a “temporary truth,” valid only for the moment that requires it. By tomorrow, it may expire and need to be rewritten again.

This installation visualizes that instability. Instead of presenting a fixed narrative, the work documents the motion of rewriting: the friction between competing versions, the gaps between what is kept and what is lost, and the fluidity through which meaning is constantly reassembled. What collapses here is not memory itself, but the illusion of coherence that the archival structure promises.

To articulate this continuous instability, the installation is distributed across four non-linear sections in the space. Rather than guiding the audience through a sequential path, the work unfolds as a dispersed constellation—more scavenger hunt than exhibition. Each section contains a partial clue: an image fragment, a text variation, a sound, a gesture of erasure, or a trace of a previous version. None of these fragments carries the full story. Only through movement—physical, perceptual, and interpretive—do connections begin to appear.

But crucially, there is no single correct configuration.
Each viewer links fragments differently.
Each pathway produces a different sense of truth.

This mirrors the logic of memory itself:
what feels real is often what we need in order to continue.
Each viewer becomes a participant in the negotiation of meaning, constructing a version of the work that is shaped by their own biases, experiences, and expectations. In this sense, the installation does not reveal my archive—it activates yours.

Drawing from the collapse described in my writing, the project embraces fragmentation, contradiction, and reassembly as generative forces. The work refuses to restore order. It refuses to produce a stable narrative. Instead, it exposes the archive as a moving structure—one that edits itself in real time, just as we do.

Ultimately, Beneath the Basement is not about remembering or forgetting.
It is about witnessing memory as an ongoing act of rewriting—
a space where chaos is not the opposite of order, but the ground on which meaning becomes possible.