Memory is often treated as archival—stable, stored, and retrievable (Schacter, 1996). This paper challenges that assumption by engaging memory through the metaphor of compost: a generative process in which fragments of lived experience decay, intermingle, and are reassembled into new meaning over time.
Drawing on Musically Enhanced Self-Inquiry (MESI), a multimodal, autoethnographic methodology that engages sound, visuals, and embodied reflection (Ramirez, 2024), three scholars in thought partnership (Akogeryam & Ramirez, 2026) explore how everyday objects—specifically food as visual and sensory material—become sites through which memory, place, and representation emerge and are reconfigured.
Through three reflexive memos centered on distinct food objects, we demonstrate how sensory engagement (taste, smell, sight, touch, and sound) surfaces layered, shifting memories rather than fixed recollections. These memos, analyzed through visual reflection, storytelling, metaphor, and arts-based practices, function as compost materials: everyday artifacts that, when engaged through MESI, generate complex intersections of identity, culture, labor, migration, and belonging.
Across these cases, we show how food operates not merely as sustenance but as visual and sensory material through which dominant assumptions of authenticity, family, and representation—often embedded in material and visual culture—are destabilized and reinterpreted through lived experience. In this way, memory is not retrieved but emerges as a fluid, relational, and constructed process.
We argue that MESI offers a framework for engaging the “messy” processes of sense-making, where multimodal and sensory engagement opens new reflexive possibilities. By positioning food as visual material, this work expands visual literacy to include how we engage visual phenomena through our senses as critical sites of analysis.
This paper invites visual literacy scholars to reconsider memory as compost, opening new possibilities for multimodal inquiry, critical reflection, and meaning-making. In this space, MESIness offers room for reflection, healing, and the naming of lived experiences as we process and embody authenticity, performance, and belonging.
