Memory Work

Memory Work is speculative scenario-fiction, imagining futures of women's work and economic transformation through the prisms of class, gender, immigration, status, and race. Expressed as an immersive soundscape and web experience, Memory Work invites audiences to visualize — in the mind’s eye — a possible future of women’s work in Toronto 2038. A blend of guided meditation, radio documentary, and cinematic soundscape, Memory Work was part of the exhibition This Women’s Work at Myseum Intersections 2020. The project is a collaboration between women’s collective At the Moment and foresight studio From Later, with contributions from Toronto women. Using strategic foresight methods, From Later developed this research-based future scenario to imagine new ways of defining, acknowledging, and valuing the wide spectrum of women’s work. Memory Work engages with ethical and moral questions around care and labour across time (past, present, and future) to question what a feminine economy could be. It hopes to empower listeners to use it as material for meditation, and stimuli for imagining collective future memory together. Listeners are encouraged to use Memory Work as a resource, to question it and iterate on it, generating their own future experiences, visions, vignettes, and artifacts.