Memory Map (2021)
8 min. loop, video installation
Fisher Gallery, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY
Memory Map is a moving-image installation investigating the experience of memory and the institutional life of mental healthcare through a family history. The film is a series of memory exercises: an inventory of objects left throughout a family home; a SimCity map recreated from memory by Sisson's brother; an old schoolyard revisited; field recordings from the present and the past; and a close attention to textures, surfaces, photographs, and fragments that seem to carry memory forward. The film asks whether documentary can function not only as a record of the past, but as a material exercise in remembering.
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Following what Sisson later encountered in Roland Barthes’ concept of the punctum, and understood as the “chill” of memory, the work traces a psychology through found objects, symbols, fragments, words, images, and places. Rather than reconstructing a factual history, Memory Map follows this associative logic through which memory organizes itself, layering images, places, symbols, sounds, and sensations into a psychological landscape. Using observational images, video collage, in-camera abstraction, drawing and tracing, text, sound, and graphic in-game mapping, the installation is assembled less through chronology than through the non-linear psychology and interiority of memory and paralleling, at moments, what Freud called “screen memory.” The film maps the experience of remembering.
The project also asks how one documents someone who remains fundamentally absent. Its perceived subject can never fully appear. Instead, the work follows traces, substitutions, and symbolic forms, approaching what cannot be directly represented. Curator Ginevra Shay described the film as showing “how institutions disappear people.” This inquiry continues to shape Sisson’s work across documentary, research, and psychoanalytic practice.
The project was mentored by artists Ariel Goldberg, Yazan Khalil, Jennifer Moon, and Kenji Fujita.
