Memory, inasmuch as it is a function of the mind, is beyond cerebral. When we reckon it as matter, time, and space suspended together in abstract imaginings, we realize that it is still, at its core, rooted in the material. In the people and places that constitute the substance of what we recollect. In the objects that trigger us to remember, or lead us to forget.

Such materiality of memory has been theorized in the humanities, cultural studies, and other related fields. It has also, most fittingly, figured as a subject and mode of art-making. Laszlo Muntean, Liedeke Plate, and Anneke Smelik’s Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture is an anthology of essays that examine creative practices of memory in which materiality is a central device. Looking into forms such as film, architecture, fashion, and the Internet, the authors explore the different links between remembering and things. What is posited is that the material world is a medium of memory through which the latter is made, shaped, and performed.

AJ Raymundo’s project for Confluence employs the same framework: material objects as mediators of his collaborators’ memories. Working with the women of Silingan Coffee, a cafe run by family members of victims of extrajudicial killings during then-President Rodrigo Duterte’s War on Drugs, he casts resin facsimiles of objects deemed precious by his collaborators. They range from actual items owned by the women—a comb, some coffee grounds they use in the cafe—to AJ’s representation of more general objects such as coins and cosmetic products.

With replication as its primary scheme, the project works with memory on two levels. First, and most evidently, it builds upon the memories of AJ’s collaborators. He gathered the objects through various prompts, asking the women about things that they carry with them all the time or things that make them happy, among other cues. These are objects of significance—markers of the women’s identity, an act of agency in defining what constitutes their own lives.

But to a broader degree, the project is also an exercise on memory through its main objective. Asserting his collaborators’ own constructions of their identities, the work most importantly seeks to reconfigure public perceptions of the Silingan women. The objective is a product of AJ’s long-standing ties with his collaborators, who would often lament how the media has boxed their identities into mere victims. But as the rosaries, lipsticks, and keychains would tell, they are more than their past tragedies.

Rendering their memories tangible and marking them in stark incongruity with how they are popularly perceived demonstrates the capacity of the objects in our memories to “help… shape a variety of identities—individual and familial, social, spatial, political, and religious” (Muntean et al., 2019). Thus, the resin facsimiles assert a counter-narrative—shifting the story towards the depth of the women’s identity. This is not to claim that they have forgotten and forgiven. But despite pain, grief, and anger, they are moving forward. Living full lives with their rosaries, lipsticks, and keychains in hand.

Text by Chesca Santiago