Memoria Feminae investigates how female memory can be embodied in order to challenge patriarchal structures and to cultivate spaces of feminist friendship and collective remembrance. Through rituals that gather hair, voices, and written recollections, the project forms a living archive where memory becomes both material and relational.

The archive manifests in three interrelated spaces. The first being a canopy, which functions as an architectural body of memory. By entering and sitting within it, visitors are immersed in the affective quality of the conversations that shaped the project. The canopy holds the questions that guided the rituals, inviting reflection and the sense of being surrounded by trust, energy, and connection.

The second space is a sound installation, extending the canopy into an auditory field where fragments of recorded conversations are woven together. Here, visitors can listen to voices that echo the intimacy of the ritual settings and sense how memory circulates in sonic form.

The third space is a table of gathering, where letters, readings, and ritual objects are displayed. This table emphasizes tactility and physical interaction, allowing the archive to be touched, opened, and reactivated through engagement.

Grounded in feminist and cultural theory, the work draws on thinkers such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Byung-Chul Han, Sophia Fritz, and Annekathrin Kohut. Their reflections on ritual, storytelling, and remembrance inform an artistic methodology that privileges embodiment, situated knowledge, and intersubjective resonance.

The work explores friendship as both a political and emotional space, tracing a path from ritual as a way of creating meaning, to storytelling as a means of transmitting embodied knowledge, and finally to hair as a material and metaphorical archive.

Situated within the field of Digital Media, Memoria Feminae responds critically to the disembodied, networked forms of memory characteristic of contemporary culture. Whereas digital archives often emphasize quantification, abstraction, and visibility, this work foregrounds slowness, tactility, and intimacy as alternative modalities of preservation and transmission. In doing so, it articulates a counterpoint to the prevailing logics of digital connectivity by placing embodied presence, affective resonance, and ritualized exchange at its core.

Ultimately, Memoria Feminae asks how women and those with perspectives on being woman, create spaces of solidarity while negotiating experiences of separation. It searches for tools to cross these thresholds: ritualized gestures, embodied archives, and the generative act of storytelling. In this way, the project proposes the archive not as a neutral container but as a living topology of relations, one that preserves while transforming, individualizing while collectivizing, and revealing memory as always both personal and political.

Photos by Eno de Wit