See our latest project work. After several weeks of building skills and building trust, the Memory Witness and Hope team has produced work worth pausing to look at — photographs, video clips, written passages, and photo collages that are already more than exercises. They are the beginnings of something.
Learning by doing
The media arts component of MWH was never intended to produce professional broadcasters. The intention was simpler and more radical: to put tools of documentation directly into the hands of people who had spent decades being documented by others — by institutions, by case workers, by researchers — and almost never by themselves.
Tablets and cameras arrived in the group space at the start of the project and were immediately picked up, passed around, pointed at walls, at each other, at windows. There was laughter. There was also something more deliberate at work — the tentative way someone lifts a camera when they understand it is not just a toy but an instrument for saying: I was here, I saw this, this is what I chose to show you.
Learning to frame a shot is learning to make a decision about what belongs inside the frame and what does not. For participants in MWH, that skill carries resonance that a photography workshop at a community centre might not carry for others. The institutional system was built on the idea that other people knew best what should be included in your life. Deciding what fits in a frame is a small reversal of that logic, but a real one.
What the work looks like
By November, the group had accumulated a body of work across several forms. Photographs taken during sessions captured candid moments — people mid-conversation, hands gesturing, faces concentrating. Some participants had taken tablets home or into the community and returned with images from their daily lives: a street corner they walk every morning, a garden, a kitchen table.
Video clips ranged from accidental to intentional. Some were short tests, the camera panning while someone figured out how it worked. Others were more deliberate — a participant speaking directly to the lens, practising the act of being on camera without the presence of an interviewer managing the exchange.
Written work had also been developing alongside the visual. Participants contributed reflections, short accounts, fragments of memory. These would eventually feed into the illustrated story that Robert Concordia was developing about his years at Rideau Regional Centre. But they also stood on their own as records of thought and experience.
Photo collages brought together found images and original photographs to explore questions the group had been discussing: ableism, memory, what it means to belong somewhere, what it means to be excluded. These were collaborative pieces, assembled across sessions and refined with each meeting.
The shape of the project ahead
November was a moment to take stock of what had been made and to begin thinking about how those pieces connect. The work would continue to evolve through to early 2020. What the group had in November was not finished — but it was evidence that something genuine was forming, made by people working on their own terms, in their own voices, toward a story that had never been told quite this way before.