Memory as a collective space

The stories we live by, shape not just how we interpret the world, but what we perceive as possible within it.

Memory is not only an individual act. It is a shared space, an invisible architecture that binds together families, communities, and entire worlds. We live within memory just as we live within landscapes — shaped by contours we did not always choose.

The collective stories, rituals, and meanings that communities create together. Like the way neighbourhoods remember local heroes, families pass down recipes that carry history, or nations build museums that shape how the past is understood.

From our earliest moments, we inherit memory as much as we create it. The stories our parents tell us, the rituals we repeat without knowing their origin, the monuments we pass — all form an undercurrent of collective remembrance. We are woven into histories larger than ourselves, often without conscious consent. We live among the memories of others.

The background hum of shared cultural memory — why certain dates feel significant, why some buildings are preserved whilst others are demolished, why particular songs can unite or divide entire communities without anyone explicitly explaining why.

Yet collective memory is not neutral. It is shaped, curated, and fiercely contested. Every society chooses which stories to enshrine and which to erase. Some memories are celebrated with national holidays and towering statues; others are buried, erased from textbooks, whispered about in the margins. Who gets to remember publicly, and who is forced to forget, becomes a profound question of power.

Consider how colonial histories are taught in schools versus indigenous accounts of the same events, or how women's contributions to movements are often footnoted whilst men's leadership is centred. Memory becomes a battleground for whose version of reality gets to be "official."

When memories are contested, the very ground of our relational worlds becomes unstable. We see it in debates over historical monuments, in battles over school curricula, in movements to restore indigenous languages, in demands for recognition of buried truths. To fight over memory is to fight over belonging, over the meaning of the past — and therefore the possibilities of the future.

If we remember slavery as a historical aberration that ended with abolition, we imagine different solutions to ongoing racial inequality than if we remember it as part of a continuing system of racial hierarchy that still shapes society today.

But memory can also be reclaimed. Across the world, communities are engaging in acts of "memory work": archiving forgotten stories, restoring suppressed languages, honouring ancestral wisdoms. These acts do more than preserve the past; they create openings in the present, pathways to relational futures not based on erasure, but on acknowledgment and care.

Projects like the StoryCorps oral history archive, Truth and Reconciliation commissions, community elders teaching traditional ecological knowledge to young people, or grassroots efforts to document neighbourhood histories before gentrification erases them.

Ways of organising society that acknowledge interdependence and historical harm, creating space for repair and different kinds of relationships. Like land back movements or reparations programmes that address past injustices whilst building new possibilities.

To think of memory as a collective space is to recognise our interdependence across time. Our identities are not solely our own. They are co-authored with those who came before, and those who will come after. Memory binds us not only to history but to hope: the hope that by remembering fully and truthfully, we can inhabit the world differently.

The recognition that who we are today is shaped by countless people we've never met, from ancestors who preserved languages and traditions, to strangers who built the systems we navigate, to future generations whose wellbeing depends on choices we make now.

To tend to collective memory is to engage in a quiet form of world-making. It asks us to listen deeply to the silences, to hold space for uncomfortable truths, and to reimagine community as something stitched together from many, sometimes contradictory, threads.

The practice of creating new realities through how we choose to remember and relate. When communities decide to honour both their ancestors' resilience and the harms they experienced, they create space for healing that wasn't there before.

In this work, forgetting is not inevitable. It is a choice — as is remembrance.