Towards an ecology of memory

We have never been so aware that our present will be a memory in the future.

Developments in neuroscience, artificial intelligence and digital technologies are profoundly transforming the way we understand human memory and how we record, preserve and retrieve the past. Never before have we had such an extensive technological infrastructure devoted to remembering. Our lives are continuously documented, archived and transformed into data, while an increasing part of our individual and collective memory is entrusted to technological systems largely outside our control.

The Vertical Horizon investigates the political implications of this unprecedented capacity to remember. The series began with a personal fear of forgetting, intensified by my father’s progressive loss of memory through frontotemporal dementia, but gradually expanded into a broader investigation of memory and forgetting at individual, social and political levels. What happens when the desire to preserve our memories becomes entangled with systems of data extraction, surveillance and control? Who decides what is preserved, what disappears and what remains permanently accessible?

At a collective level, the project also questions the assumption that remembering is always inherently positive. Historical memory is essential for confronting violence and injustice, yet memories can also be selected, manipulated and mobilised to sustain political identities, nationalist narratives and inherited conflicts. The Vertical Horizon asks whether forgetting might sometimes have a constructive role (not as an erasure or denial of history), but as the possibility of loosening the hold of the past over the present.

From a geological perspective, five hundred years is barely a blink of an eye. Against the deep time of the Earth, our increasingly sophisticated attempts to preserve traces of ourselves acquire a different meaning. This shift in scale gives the series its title—The Vertical Horizon—and connects its three main projects: Digital Trauma (video essay), The Refuge (film) and One Year Life Strata (digital media). Across them, memory emerges not simply as something we possess, but as a contested territory: something that can be preserved, inherited, extracted, manipulated and weaponised.