In recent years we as human beings are producing an enormous quantity of data, through messages, photos, comments continuously shared between us.

In some way we are creating digital memories, mementos of experiences, persons, places, but the memory is not just  a collection of random data, but a structured  and organized repository of linked and categorized items and even more meaningful for us. Facebook with the Timeline feature is an attempt to transform posts in memories integrating dates, milestones, life events, from a personal and individual prospective. In the future more powerful tools will help us to categorize and keep our memory in the cloud always accessible and our kids will have a full digital report of their life since their birth.

These memories are not just personal but they tell about the social customs, traditions, habits of a certain period.They can narrate an historical act from an enormous variety of points of view,  give us insights about the evolution of a city over time,as well as preserve a record of a lost  tradition.

In the last four years i have been involved in different projects for Italian and international museums and institutiosn like Home movies (1) , ‘Family‘ and  Moorreensburg,  (2), that concern the collective memories and the way to access them.

Now with TOO design consultancy I‘m working on a project called  Il Cristallo della Memoria (  Crystal of Memories),

The aim of the project is to collect and preserve crowdsourced  images, videos and texts about a specific place in  North Italy that  used to be an old crushed plant site and now is a public park.

We want to materialize this accumulation of memories as a stele on site, with a QR code engraved on it. The QR represent  a link on the website, the organized repository of collective memories.

How do you see the archive of our memories of the future?

What will be the rule of an Historian ?

Jake Barton of Local Project did a fantastic lecture about collect memories

Check it out

BMW Guggenheim Lab- 9/11 Memorial & Museum Talk from Local Projects on Vimeo.

(1) Home movies is the italian national archive that collects and digitalizes the private home movies from the 1920 to 1980.

(2) Moorreensburg is a rural town in the Western Cape province of South Africa.