Memory Tides investigates how artistry and cultural memory in Funafuti, Tuvalu circulates through practices that fall outside formal archival and digital systems. Centered on Tuvaluan handicraft practices, the project identifies traditional handmade works, oral histories, gesture, and communal creations as living archives that sustain community knowledge in an environment that is undergoing unprecedented spatial change. These types of intangible heritage highlight the limitations of documentation and pose more general queries about how material traditions, cultural continuity, and spatial practices endure in the face of environmental change in Tuvalu.
The project emerged through a connection with local weaver Viapoa, whose works are on display at the Tuvalu Women’s Handicraft Centre, a connection that led to an invitation into her home, where the textures and lineage of her craft came into focus. With only a general landmark and no reliable digital map, her woven fan became an unintended navigational device for the researchers seeking her home, forming a vernacular cartography grounded in recognition and community memory rather than coordinates. With the help of neighbors who recognized Viapoa’s distinctive patterns and materials, directions unfolded through the social familiarity embedded in the community. In this process, the fan functioned as both document and spatial connector, revealing how knowledge adapts to shifts in landscape and the loss of material infrastructure. Memory Tides positions memory as dynamic and participatory, proposing an archive of possibility that resists the flattening that occurs when memory is separated from its social, spatial, and material contexts.
