On Tracing Memory is an attempt to remember, re-remember, and locate an alwaysshifting origin. It reflects on inherited memories, those not experienced firsthand but received in fragments through photographs, stories, and gestures. Working across digital and physical space, I consider memories of the matriarchs in my family who remained in Guangdong during the Chinese head tax (1885) and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1923)— histories of women largely unaccounted for in formal archives. Reckoning with the sparse information that remains, I turn to accounts from my family and look to embodied knowledge as a form of archive, re-materializing ephemera from a space of speculative memory. As this act of replication resists erasure, it intervenes in traditional modes of historical documentation, challenging notions of authenticity and the value of the original.
Photos by Toni Hafkenscheid courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto