An Archive of Future Memories

An Archive of Future Memories is a multimedia project about a mother and daughter charting the interconnections between a trilogy of familial forced displacements and their relationship to pivotal moments in contemporary Iraqi/diasporic and American histories, the ongoing living effects of U.S. military interventions, and their ever-evolving effect on intergenerational relations. It weaves performance, biography, art, sound, and letter-writing toward bearing witness to the textures of war-based displacement and racialized dispossession, especially in the moment of exile.

The ongoing performance and multimedia archival project explores fugitive realities, memory as presence, and mothering at the end of the world. Living through a time of infinite war — when the end of the world has been experienced several times over — the desire to reimagine a future is engendered through the quotidian practices of mothering. Intimacy, caregiving, and devotion between a mother and daughter generate an embodied creative process to recover memory, ghostly remains, and a repertoire of possibilities toward futurity.

The archive embraces a feminist approach through a hybrid form of letter writing, images, and prose poetry that center familial lived experiences, memory, and emotions. The letter, the first of a series, bears witness to three pivotal moments in contemporary Iraqi/diasporic and American histories and collective memory: the 1980 Iraq–Iran War, the First Gulf War, and the Second Gulf War and U.S. occupation of Iraq.