Echoing memories: Migration, the senses, and the city in Metro Vancouver, Canada

Abstract

Using images, video, and text, I weave together two walks and several conversations on the senses, migration, and memory. I focus on echoes or resonances as a method to attend to the relation between remembering, sensory emplacement and urban materialities. Using comments from my interlocutors who migrated to Metro Vancouver from outside Canada, as well as autobiographical reflections on sensate memories in urban landscapes, I investigate how forgetting and memory are co-implicated, and I propose that echoes can help us think of spatial and social displacements. I include digital meaning making practices like videos, photographs, and montage, as well as hand-written notes, stories, lists, and drawings. These in turn accompany the kinesthetic inhabiting of the city through walking, standing, and sensing in place.