Hogar de la Distancia: Memory Transmission Containers

By Fernanda Espinosa, 2017

Found on Lucid Press.

Through the project Hogar de la distacia (Home of Distance), Fernanda Espinosa interviewed Ecuadorian immigrants in New York and then created oral history-based digital memory containers in collaboration with artists using visual and sound compositions.

By using oral history as a primary source and medium for the construction of these “Memory Transmission Containers,” Espinosa’s creative exploration challenges and expands traditional Western ideas of the archive. Her work asks how oral history can have a broader reach and, simultaneously, a more focused transmission through asking questions like: What might posterity mean for participants, considering their specific cultural history and present experience? How could narrators more easily access and even make use of the recording? And, can preservation happen through circulation?

 

Fernanda Espinosa is an oral historian and cultural organizer based in New York and Quito. She has been generating, listening to, and interpreting oral histories to inform creative public interventions that aspire to act as platforms for resistance and dialogue.

Fernanda holds a degree in Oral History from Columbia University, where her thesis was awarded the 2018 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award.  She is the co-founder and coordinator of Cooperativa Cultural 19 de enero (CC 1/19), an ongoing art and oral history collaboration with visual artists. She is a former member and co-founder of People’s Collective Arts/Colectivo de Arte Popular and is currently the Associate Manager of StoryCorps’ Mobile Tour program.