Personal Memory, Collective Memory
Artist in Residency April 2025 - Mentor: Yunuen Perez Vertti
Bruce Elementary School - Vancouver School Board - AIRS
Over the course of a five-week residency, students at Bruce Elementary explored how memory lives in us, and how it can be expressed, reimagined, and woven together through visual storytelling. Memory exists in many forms—some vivid, others fragmented. Some evolve into values we carry forward, while others fade or shift over time. Alongside these personal recollections is a collective memory, built through the stories we share, the images we make, and the art that holds our experiences. This residency is an effort to visually represent the journey of memory, emotion, and creative expression. Students began by exploring their own personal memories—learning to recognize, process, and express them through art. From there, they weave these individual experiences into something collective, shaping a shared story that connects past to present, self to others.
Guided by the core values of encircling, curiosity, empathy, and remembrance, students were invited to think about a memory they want to carry with them into the future. In the first 2 weeks, they each created a collage as a physical record of this memory based on the colours, sounds, feelings, shapes that were present in the memories they picked, which revolved around moments that made them feel loved and belonged, a lesson that they learned, or something they wanna keep with them over this past year. In the subsequent weeks, each class receives a set of copies of images from the other class, which, acting as agents of time, they are invited to crush, crumble, and even tear the memory copy. Then, using techniques of mending and creative scanning, they become beholders of somebody else's memory, repairing the rips while also creatively adding onto the existing picture as they scan the images with added movements and layered gels. The process is deeply inspired by the organic, multilayered ways that memory changes and altered through time. It ended up being a valuable process that allowed students to exercise a creative mode of artmaking that made space for changes to take place and restrained them from the tendency of perfectionism and result-oriented mindset.
As we concluded the residency, each class connected the memory copies they worked with all into one big chain of images which they collectively curated through connections by shapes and colours. All the classes then created a collective installation, hanging these “train of memories” amongst the trees and the wind, observing and recollecting how each of their own memories have transformed through time, while observing and relating themselves to the shape of the collective memory representation they have created together. Through this process, they not only developed personal emotional awareness but also engaged in the powerful act of collective storytelling—building bridges between personal and shared histories, between one another, between ruptures and care.
