Mapping Memories
South African artists Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter interviewed a number of Senegalese immigrants for their 2006 project UrbaNET: Hillbrow/Dakar/Hillbrow. Hillbrow, a poor neighborhood in Johannesburg is home to a number of Dakar expats. The artists asked the Senegalese immigrants to draw maps for them to use during their two-week residency in Dakar. From Rhizome:
Over the course of the residency, the artists documented their journey in photographs and video and even visited friends and relatives of the mapmakers. For the 2007 exhibition of their project at University of Johannesburg, Neustetter and Hobbs conducted a twenty-person walk from the campus, in Auckland Park, to a Congolese nightclub in Hillbrow, where the project was discussed by art-goers, neighborhood residents and the mapmakers. Neustetter and Hobbs’ project thus does not profess to establish any authoritative study of the respective cities it maps, but rather overlays remembrance, map-making, navigation and the documentary image to tell the specific tales of a group of immigrants and a broader story about home, migration and place.
If you Google around, you’ll see memory maps are often assigned in grade schools. I wish my teachers were that creative. There is a Memory Map Flickr pool and last year, Kottke made a list of a projects. Al
Fraken can draw the United States from memory, which makes one wish there 
were a quiz show/pictionary component to political debates.
Veering in a different direction, City of Memory compiles stories and anecdotes marked by contributors on a map of New York City. Next Great Thing suggests with a “mobile component, people could lifecast their past, in a way, letting place serve as a trigger for recollection.”
A great book about recollecting memory is Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. It’s a story about a man awarded millions in compensation after an accident. He constructs buildings and hires actors to act out the parts of a memory he remembers only slight details about, but keeps coming back to mind.
Nothing is more frustrating then realizing a memory isn’t coming back. And there’s not much you can do it about it. The more you revisit a memory the more you damage it. It gets tainted by present events and reanalysis.
Art by Kunie Sugiura.
Good magazine posts this easy to read infograph of international currencies. Glad I saved those Euros when I was abroad last spring. Note the troubled South African rand.
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