Memory Maps

Memory Maps is a fascinating arts project that encourages the reader to participate.

Memory Maps is a joint venture between the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Memory Maps is a website designed to inspire and foster work which will continue this approach to writing by providing focal points of interest - catalysts of thought - in the form of paintings and artifacts, alongside databases about people and places. It could also have been called after Proust's madeleine, the subtly flavoured biscuit he dipped in tea which, as if softened, set off a train of memories and meditations. Proust was revisiting a world he knew in the recent past, whereas Memory Maps spreads out in rings beyond the familiar and personal past into more distant time too, and charts, like an old portolan, unexamined coastlines, land masses, and possible harbours. This genre of literature, fusing so many modes of inquiry and imagination, has a political undertow - even a political purpose. A memory map involves individual creativity but it is also an essentially collaborative enterprise; writing and thinking along these lines engages with common issues of great urgency.