Memory in Motion

Abstract

Memory in Motion illustrates the ways that replicating a now-lost culinary practice achieves stickiness through the affective transfer of ideas and experiences for visitors in history museums. It explores how embodied re-enactment both preserves and creates memories, while instilling senses of social value, currency and meaning in the museum, and in heritage more broadly. The work also considers museums, particularly house museums, recipes, and in this instance—sponge cake—as sites of memory and nostalgia, and their contemporary relevance. By interweaving resonant fragments of the museum’s collection and family (hi)stories with a performative activity embedded in memory and motion, we see the development of stickiness through a relational assemblage framework centred around emotional connections to food in the past and in the present, with a view to the future.with a view to the future.