I Remember Everything

I Remember Everything maps that space where my daughter and I connect through walking. We have walked together since before she was born, and now that we live in separate cities, the project serves to make space and time for the relationship despite distance. We walk in her city and mine, Brooklyn and Des Moines, and we go back to Chicago, thick with memories. Whether we are moving through spaces familiar or strange, layers of experience are recovered, relocated, renewed. When we travel the same path, my story cannot be told without hers.
 
We talk about walking and looking as gendered experience. Part of being female is never quite feeling safe on the street. We talk about signals that make us avoid or feel welcomed by the built and social environment. We choose walking clothes carefully, and sometimes we costume either to blend in or to be people we thought we should be. Conversation wanders through the past and to the future, but step by step and breath by breath, walking keeps us in the present.
 
While we talk about everything, we also stop to take photos, write, draw, and collect ephemera from the street. I then build collages with those materials, digitally and manually, into a series that I call maps, but they aren’t maps about specific wayfinding. They are the geography of a relationship through place and time.