“Yes, I am palimpsest too”
3 September 2019
“Yes, I am palimpsest too, a place made over but trying to trace back”
— Trace, Lauret Savoy
As history passes, just like the land with erosion traces, our personal stories are marked. In her essays, Lauret Savoy combines family history with geologic time: childhood memories of the Grand Canyon, desert and coasts of California; retracing her father’s work while also describing the alluvial plains and glaciation that created the Great Lakes. She explores how the land is marked and the inscribed histories found in individuals. In my project, I create a bridge between geology and genealogy, studying the visible traces of time left upon the earth’s surface and using geology as a metaphor for the past of each individual. How can we be the geologist of our ancestry?
Mountains are formed by accumulations of sediments through time. We, also, have a story before the one we build: what are our roots? What did our ancestors do? How much the past is inscribed in ourselves? From what do we take our identity? I assimilate stones as a representation of each personal story and I collect them from my hikes, as you collect family archives and memories.
Geology gives us the key to read the past of our land and learn from it. What about us: How do find an answer to these silenced memories? How can we re-trace our story?
— Trace, Lauret Savoy
As history passes, just like the land with erosion traces, our personal stories are marked. In her essays, Lauret Savoy combines family history with geologic time: childhood memories of the Grand Canyon, desert and coasts of California; retracing her father’s work while also describing the alluvial plains and glaciation that created the Great Lakes. She explores how the land is marked and the inscribed histories found in individuals. In my project, I create a bridge between geology and genealogy, studying the visible traces of time left upon the earth’s surface and using geology as a metaphor for the past of each individual. How can we be the geologist of our ancestry?
Mountains are formed by accumulations of sediments through time. We, also, have a story before the one we build: what are our roots? What did our ancestors do? How much the past is inscribed in ourselves? From what do we take our identity? I assimilate stones as a representation of each personal story and I collect them from my hikes, as you collect family archives and memories.
Geology gives us the key to read the past of our land and learn from it. What about us: How do find an answer to these silenced memories? How can we re-trace our story?
