Re-member to Remember

A Reflective Collector of Home Memories for Slum Dwellers

Fall 2022 @ Yale

Bangkok, Thailand

Home is a metaphoric collector of memories. Past memories are re-membered as figural objects, and thus become the creator of human life and new spatial experiences. The two systems of a sculptural figure and the grid act as the figure vs ground, which invades each other and bring ups the ambiguity of order and hierarchy. The mirrored aluminum surface reflects different things at various angles. The object never changes, but as people move around, what they see and feel is changing all the time. Therefore the visual definition of home is not fixed, it depends merely on where you see it, how you feel it and who you stay with.

The two systems as the figure vs ground invade each other and bring up the ambiguity of order and hierarchy. The way rooms are carved out of the solidity implies how people are inhabiting the poche. It challenges people to fill up the story on their own by completing the room boundaries through a combination of reality and their imagination. Activities of human life plug in the sculptural figure and make it obscure that if a grid is imposed on the figural object or vice versa?

Initial research of Bangkok was done by collecting fragments from people’s living and working memories. It was found that people normally only recalled a portion or an element from past experiences , so the emphasis was put on their qualities of unclear, evanescent and discrete.  When familiar elements are intentionally off scaled, deconstructed and misplaced, people can still recognize them but start to read them in new ways

Site analysis: memory fragments

In the study model the uncertainty of memories was visualized by testing various reflective materials like mirror and polished paper to look at how existing elements could be fragmented and reconnected based on different angles.