- Assignment Title: Childhood Memories.
- Assignment Description: Think back to a place you remember vaguely from your childhood—somewhere that left a strong impression but remains unclear in your memory. Your goal is to research and try to locate this place using tools like Google Maps, online searches, or even by asking people who might remember (e.g., family members).
Steps:
1. Recall the Memory: Choose a childhood memory with a place that you can't remember specific where/what it was.
2. Research the Place: Use any tools or resources available to try and identify or find this location. This could include searching keywords online, looking on Google Maps, asking family members or friends who might know.
3. Document Your Process: Keep a record of your research journey. If you find the place, compare your memory of it to its current state or what you discover online. If you can’t locate it, reflect on what it feels like to search for something elusive.
4. Share your findings with the group: Highlight any differences between your vague memory and the real or imagined place. If the place remains unfound, the process and reflections will still tell an important story.
For example... I have this vague memory of being stuck in the outside maze with pink walls. I can't remember anything else other than that maze from that day and where it was. I'd wanna find out what the occasion was since it is one of my earliest memories.
- Created by: Marine One
- Responded by: Yulin Huang, Roberta Borroni, Medb, Francesco Felletti, Marine One
medb - Research document into places I saw in my dreams as a child
Marine One - Pink Maze
Francesco Felletti - Story of the Belly of a Garden
Francesco Felletti - Story of the Belly of a Garden
Francesco Felletti - The Yellow Snake in the Garden
Roberta Borroni - Recollection of memories in room 31
Yulin Huang - Once I sat on the back of an alligator and felt its skin
YH: I don’t have very many vague childhood memories to choose from. this task made me realise how few memories I actually have of my life before eighteen which made me feel very existential. in the end I chose this encounter with a taxidermy alligator. it was between that or being forced to go into this terrifying alien exhibition full of fake alien models and animatronics that towered over me. that intense fear and fascination around the immersive fakeness of things never went away. to document the processing of this alligator memory, I decided to challenge myself in trying (and I am ashamed that this is my first proper attempt) to make a mini zine. graphic design, paper folding and crafting involving scissors are not my strong points. at my volunteering work for a local writing festival I have been tasked with making social media graphics on canva templates. I also recently deleted adobe, so canva has been kind of randomly something I’ve been using. there’s also some public domain images and graphics I feel strange about using. how do we feel about canva? and using images and graphics made by other people?? hm. it feels very corporate. but I guess it's good for quick experiments. I’m still searching for an accessible replacement for photoshop. anyway it took me many hours and four attempts of trial and error on my printer that doesn’t print double sided to finally hold a version of this printer-paper zine where all the pages are at the right place they’re supposed to be. I definitely was doing all the steps in very diy ways but I am really enjoying that kind of scrappy experimentation. the resulting mini zine had bits of white sticking out, ripped corners and text accidentally cut off from my scissors, but she does exist and it’s inspiring me to make more mini zine prototypes. it is interesting because after the process of this assignment I now view this vague memory as something else entirely. the memory now holds a different version of the vagueness and I think that’s fascinating.
RB: I wasn't able to find a single memory of a place that fit into the description: something that left an impression on me in childhood and that I wasn't able to easily put on a map. I have tried a few places and immediately found them, the memory of their name was strong enough that I could just google them. Then I thought about other important places in my childhood, and perhaps because I grew up and lived in the same small town most of my life, everything felt quite vivid in my mind, as I have lived these spaces as a teenager and young adult too.I was thinking about all of this while I was sitting on my chair at work, and for some reason it made me think about walking up and down some imaginary stairs, bringing a memory up to test if it would fit in the categories, and then bringing it back down to let it go. And then my attention was caught by one painting - a painting I have seen over and over - by Bernardo Cavallino. But that day I was able to see the staircase depicted in the background for the first time, as the panic and commotion of the people in the painting has always taken all my attention. That day I kept thinking about the person on the stairs in that painting, walking up yet not touching the floor, levitating, just like my memories. I felt like Cavallino in 1640 represented exactly what I was feeling that day recalling details of memories that are usually forgotten.
M: The only place I could think of when approaching this brief was a faint ephemeral glimmer of being sat in a massive blue restaurant with cartoons of coffee and abstract 90's triangles on the walls but I have asked my parents about this many's a time and they have given me nothing to go on and as I lived between Canada and Ireland as en enfant I found the task of locating this one rogue establishment down to be too overwhelming across two vastly different countries. Instead I turned to recurring images from dreams I had as a child that drove me wild with the urge to run away inside them. I started with Marine's Google Maps suggestion to investigate the scrubland we used to play in at the bottom of our estate - that has now been landscaped and turned into a "woodland park trail". As children we were only allowed to go so far into the land however and never beyond the trees, which is why I think it became a recurring motif in my young dreams to envision escaping into some Secret Garden-esque paradise that perhaps lay beyond them. Then I got thinking of a memory of trying to explain what that place looked like in my head to my dad when he was reading me a Dr Seuss book at bedtime and excitedly pointing at an illustration and saying "It looks like that! That colour is what it looks like!" and he brushed me off and told me I was being silly. But I meant it! I couldn't find the exact Dr Seuss book we were reading at the time but upon investigating every available Dr Seuss PDF on the internet I discovered another favourite book of mine, The Sleep Book from 1962, in which that exact shade of Seuss blue is used for all the nighttime scenes. This in turn got me thinking about the night/sky scenes from one of the most formative movies of my childhood, Dougal and the Blue Cat (1970) in which the little dog Dougal sleeps outside in a bed under a tree below a mountain where the haunting abandoned treacle factory sits (I once compared Balham BT Exchange to said factory in a poem I wrote when I lived in London, which then sent my mind whirring away again about the work I made for Hanya's brief and how everything in my life is a circle... but I digress). The whole film is so dreamlike anyway but that opening sequence - with Dougal recounting the dreams he thinks he had the night before - was so evocative to me and still makes me shiver to think about.
FF: This was a great excercise and very emotional. I said all on my audio sorry!!
MO: I have this vague memory of being stuck in an outdoor maze with pink walls. I can't remember anything else from that day except the maze and not knowing where it was. I want to find out what the occasion was, since it is one of my earliest memories. I must have been five or six. I remember struggling to find the exit, and just seeing pink walls again and again, no matter how much I ran.I googled “pink huge maze” and found it. I asked my mom to confirm, and she said that was the one. Apparently, she also struggled to get out and was frustrated. I don't know how I struggled to find this place before, when it turned out to be this easy to track down.It is in a huge park with mountains and a lake, in Nagano, a quiet prefecture in Japan. It is about a four-hour drive from Tokyo.It is not as pink as I remembered, either because of how I remembered it or because the pink paint has faded over time.I remember going there with my mom and her boyfriend at the time. I think he was the one covered in tattoos and had some issues with alcohol. I only saw him as a kind of punky guy with tattoos and a mohawk who raised his voice at us sometimes, but I did not really see that as a problem back then. If I met him now as an adult, I would probably hate him so much.