Theoretical Focus: Peripeteia—drawn from Greek drama—marks the moment of narrative reversal. We apply this concept to memory: What happens when we turn memory forward? Using Bristow’s idea of memory-as-invention and Marcel Mauss’s notion of total history, participants curate past weeks’ works into a regenerative, transgenerational installation. The archive is not just a place of loss, but a proposition: a speculative offering to future kin.

Practices:

Prepare multimedia pieces for exhibition (text, sound, video, performance)

Peer feedback and curatorial statements (the statements for when you exhibit your work, the feedback if you’ve been working as a group).

Optional submission to Poetic Phonotheque or international eco-poetry venues

Exercise:

Create a “memory altar” using elements from each week.
Idea: Title your final work as a question to future generations, inviting open-ended ecological dialogue.  Feedback of course and wrap-up reflection.

Peripetia – ‘r’eversal

This poetics of memory fails; it is western, linear, diachronic. Deborah Rose said that it feels that the Anthropocene is hailing us from the future into our ‘now.’10 What would it take to set up a gallery using the animist framework of mythology, for example the Australian aboriginal alternate universe of Dreamtime where past, present and future are one? How might we be affected if we were to imagine, just for one moment, that the past is before us? With structured affective registers programmed into the visitor experience, our institutions might become active processes by which meaning is created. New installations and galleries could be designed to affectively disclose a political tension between the idea of memory as recollection or witness of a forgotten past and memory being used to imagine or to create a present or future community.

– Tom Bristow, Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities.

Reflection & Wrap-Up

Week 6 is an opportunity to gather the threads of the course into a single, interconnected work. Across the past five weeks, you have created sonic archives, visual testimonies, mythic reframings, embodied gestures, and kinship-based performances. This week asks you to see these pieces not as separate exercises but as interconnected chapters in one story—an evolving archive of ecological witness and imagination.

The “memory altar” you create—whether as an installation, a digital presentation, or a conceptual space—becomes a site where grief, resilience, and speculative care converge. It should include elements from each week’s work and carry forward the course’s themes of ecological ethics, kinship, and regenerative poetics.

Title your final work as a question to future generations. Let this question remain open-ended, inviting dialogue rather than closure. Consider how it might resonate beyond the moment of presentation, becoming a prompt for others to continue the work of remembering differently.

Invitation to Submit
You are warmly invited to submit your final work to the Poetic Phonotheque—a living, multilingual archive of poetry, sound, and performance from around the world. Your piece may take the form of an audio recording, video poem, or multimedia documentation of your final installation. In contributing, you join a global network of artists, poets, and cultural workers committed to ecological memory and creative resilience. Visit www.poeticphonotheque.com for submission guidelines.

The conclusion of this course is not an ending but a reversal—a turning of memory toward the future, where your archive becomes an offering, an act of kin-making, and a space of return.

The Archive is Alive
by Elizabeth Torres (Madam Neverstop)

Dear friend,

We began with memory as seed. We listened to rivers and wind, to open wounds, to the hum of machines and the silence between breaths. We drew what was vanishing. What we will never embrace. We wove the voices of ancestors into moving images. We let the body speak where words would not hold. Week by week, you have built a language of your own—sometimes out of sound, sometimes out of light, sometimes out of the quiet between gestures.

And now we stand in peripeteia—the turn in the story. In Greek drama, it is the moment when all that was certain is undone. In life, it is the moment when we realize that what we thought was past is still here, alive in us.

Poetry has always known this. It knows that grief is not something we move through and leave behind; it is an element we live in, like air or water. It knows that memory is not a static vault but a living organism—capable of sprouting new forms, adapting to new climates, breaking open in the light of a question we have not yet asked.

This course has been a practice in holding grief without collapsing under it, in carrying memory without freezing it in place. It has been about letting the personal meet the planetary, so that neither is diminished. In the process, you have made works that remember not only for yourself but for the world: sonic testaments, visual vigils, embodied prayers.

Tom Bristow reminds us that memory can be invention as much as recollection, a way of making futures from what we carry forward. Deborah Rose tells us the Anthropocene is calling to us from the future. I believe your work is part of our answer to that call. Each poem, image, and movement you have made here is not just a record, a passing exercise. It is a window, or better yet, a body of work that could allow you to see the parts of yourself that carry your strongest memories, your identity—it is a proposal. It asks: what if we cared enough to remember differently?

So as we close, I ask you not to close the work. Let it keep unfolding. Let the grief you’ve touched become a channel for kinship. Let the memory you’ve shaped be porous enough for others to enter. Let the poetry you’ve made remain in motion—because poetry is not an artifact, it is a current.

The archive you now hold is alive. It will not stay still. It will change as you change, as the world changes. Maybe right now it is in a little shoe box, but in the circular process of creativity, there is enough there for a more refined, in-depth artistic investigation. And perhaps, years from now, someone you will never meet will find a piece of it and feel less alone. That is the power of poetry. That is the work of memory. That is the gift we offer in the presence of loss. Carry it forward. Neverstop.