11 November, 2008 — Remembrance Day
A Remembrance Day Memory Event
You are invited!
November 11, 2008, 1 to 5 p.m.
Listel Hotel, 1300 Robson Street, Vancouver
Readings, performances, exhibits
ALL WELCOME
free admission
Sheila Heti on memory, dreams and narrative
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas on Haida manga and culture-crossing
Faith Moosang on the futile gesture in found photo albums
Christopher Grabowski on returning home
The Vancouver Memory Festival is a free-floating series of public events that focus on public and private memory. The events are improvised and open-ended and will unfold in different venues around the city throughout 2008, the year of British Columbia’s sesquicentennial.
New World, Old World — David Campion and Sandra Shields Mountains, lakes, and valleys play a major role in how we orient ourselves within the world. In “New World, Old World” Campion explores the modern-day floodplain of the Fraser River in a series of photographs that are paired with first-hand accounts and memories unearthed by Sandra Shields of the landscape’s past. 
Unofficial Histories — Faith MoosangFrom the Blue Star Potato Chip factory during WWII to the trenches of Vimy Ridge and beyond — Moosang constructs personal perspectives of historical events from abandoned photograph albums discovered in Vancouver. 
Habitations and Inhabitants — Anne Grant A photographic exploration of one old apartment house and its residents, past and present, as a means to discover the effect of place on memory (and vice versa), and the ways in which photography becomes memory (and vice versa).
Emigrant and Immigrant — Goran Basaric A photographer returns to his old neighbourhood in Serbia to seek out his childhood haunts and contrast them to those of his ten-year-old son growing up in Vancouver.
RECENT PROJECTS
At SFU Harbour Centre in august 2008
A presentation and discussion
with Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
on art, memory and the power of small.
Click here for details about the project.
At the fibre essence gallery, july-august 2008
An exhibition of textile works Fibre Essence Gallery invited textile artists to submit pieces that reflect the connection between material and memory.
At SFU Harbour Centre in May 2008
Memory & Narrative – David AlbahariA talk and reading by David Albahari took place on Monday, 12 May, at SFU Harbour Centre. He spoke of the ties between identity and memory, and questioned why we cling to our memories so desperately. Most arrestingly, Albahari proposed that “out of all of the possible stories we are afraid we will find ourselves in a story where nothing happens.”
Click here for details
The Downtown Memory ProjectPlace evokes memory. Participants in this contest were invited to write about a memory they had of downtown Vancouver and the result was arresting. Literally. Several pieces were selected to be written on the windows of the Harbour Centre building. Others were nestled into corners of the building itself. The exhibit will reopen at the Vancouver Museum in November 2008.
Click here for more details about the Harbour Centre project, May to July 2008.
at the push festival IN JANUARY 2008
Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut
A play about remaking memoryby James Long
Staged from Janaury 29 to February 3, Performance Works was home to this stunning multi-disciplinary piece. It also featured a talk with Memory Festival artist Faith Moosang, which was swell.
Most recently, the play won the Sydney Risk Prize for Outstanding Original Script by an Emerging Playwright as well as the Jessie Award’s Innovation Award sponsored by the Vancouver Sun. Congratulations everyone!
Click here for more details about the play.
a rumble productions—theatre replacement production in association with the PuSh Festival
Chinese Canadian and Aboriginal writers offer stories about family gatherings, home cooking, restaurant outings in Eating Stories: A Chinese Canadian & Aboriginal Potluck.
Lost Memory, an award-winning photo essay by Kazuyoshi Ehara, from Geist No. 62.
The Contest of Memory, a story about the woman who invented the Remembrance Day Poppy, the Canadian poet who inspired her, and a dream dreamt by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and described by Jorge Luis Borges, by Stephen Osborne from Geist No. 43.
The Memory Website sponsored by Exploratorium, the museum of science, art and human perception at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.
