The same place. Different histories. Two histories in a room — moving apart, the archive diverges. Moving together, something neither has seen before surfaces on the wall.
A platform for embodied collective memory.
The social geometry of bodies in space determines what history is visible.
First instantiation: McDonough, Georgia — Starr Photograph Collection, 1821–present.
One person enters the installation. A single thread of the archive surfaces — photographs of this place, from one vantage, one time. The experience is solitary, partial.
A second person enters. They move in the opposite direction. The archive diverges — two different histories of the same ground become visible simultaneously on the same walls.
They begin to walk toward each other. The system reads their approach. Photographs begin to surface that belong to both histories at once — moments where the two memories of a place overlap, contradict, or simply coexist.
A room full of people produces a configuration the archive has never shown before.
This is not a history lesson. It does not explain or resolve the divergent histories it surfaces. It does not assign photographs to people based on identity.
The archive responds to movement and relationship — the physical geometry of how people occupy shared space together. What surfaces is a function of that geometry, not of who the people are.
The piece works in McDonough, Georgia. It works in New Orleans after a flood. It works in Detroit after the plants closed. It works in any place where two communities have lived on the same ground and remember it differently.
The photographs change. The logic stays the same.
First Archive — McDonough, Georgia — Starr Collection & Creek Nation records — 200+ photographs — 1821–present