Name: Mnemonic Watercolors: Reconstructing Childhood Scenes Amidst Pandemic Isolation
Start: 2026-10-08T13:00:00-0400
End: 2026-10-08T13:30:00-0400

Mnemonic Watercolors: Reconstructing Childhood Scenes Amidst Pandemic Isolation

Thursday October 8, 2026 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT

Circular Church

Recent advances in media technology have reinforced a culture of visual immediacy and digital archiving. Images are routinely captured and stored—yet rarely revisited—outsourcing memory to technological repositories rather than engaging with it actively. This paper explores a counter‑gesture: reconstructing childhood memories through analogue practices as a form of mnemonic resistance.

During pandemic isolation, the author undertook watercolor exercises to reimagine childhood scenes without photographs or archival materials, drawing solely on 35–40 years of personal memory. The resulting watercolors depict domestic and neighborhood spaces—suburban fringes reframed through adulthood and crisis-afflicted affect (Derrida, 1996). These paintings prioritize textures, colors, and spatial atmospheres over photographic accuracy, resisting erasure in a culture driven by instantaneous documentation (Sontag, 1977). This method foregrounds spatial revealing within architecture: how scale and temporal perception shape remembered environments (Pallasmaa, 2012). It examines suburban forms not as generic backdrops but as repositories of identity, memory, and belonging, revealing how architecture mediates subjective experience.

In this context, the threat of pandemic death far from home heightened the need to anchor memories—a search for meaning and emotional refuge within remembered spaces. The slow, corporeal engagement of painting stands in contrast to the disembodied speed of digital media, emphasizing affective labor and embodied recollection. Dialogues with relatives who shared these spaces reveal the dialogic nature of memory, highlighting its collective as well as individual dimensions (Halbwachs, 1992). Thus, painting from memory becomes a meditative act of recollection—a reclaiming of subjective, embodied dimensions in an era dominated by automated visuality.

By engaging Memory Studies, Media Theory, and Architecture, this paper contributes to debates on the materiality of memory, the aesthetics of recollection, and the cultural implications of digital mediation. It demonstrates how mnemonic watercolors serve as a site for reasserting depth, affect, and spatial consciousness amidst mediated immediacy.

Thursday October 8, 2026 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Circular Church

Paper

about <strong style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Gonzalo Munoz-Vera</strong> is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at Virginia Tech and Ph.D. in History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University. Since 2005, he has studied the influence of images as a globalizing tool for shaping cultures and cities through aesthetics and appearances. His doctoral research studied the role of visuals in the construal of cities and cultures in a nineteenth-century Western visuality installing the foundations of current seeing conventions. He has previously taught in architecture schools in Chile, Colombia, and Canada.

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