How To Burn A Memory

How to Burn a Memory explores trauma and its manifestations as a physical entity—encoded in DNA and passed between generations.

How to Burn a Memory explores trauma and its manifestations as a physical entity—encoded in DNA and passed between generations. The series draws on epigenetics research suggesting that this inheritance is more than psychological: it can alter gene expression itself, embedding a parent's or grandparent's experiences at a cellular level. Working with my late grandfather's Super 8 films and color-slide photographs, the series re-projects, re-contextualizes, and transforms archival material to make visible the distortion that occurs when memory travels through a body, a generation, a bloodline.

My grandfather was a temperamental and difficult man. His outbursts shaped my mother's sense of self; alcohol became one way she managed this distortion, perpetuating its anxiety-inducing effects on me. But epigenetics suggests causation that moves in both directions: the same gene expression that primes me for anxiety likely primed them. Their harmful behavior was not random. It came from nervous systems wired to overreact, passed down and compounded across three generations.

The original footage—decades of material no one in the family had seen in over fifty years—shows familiar places filmed by a man each of us knew differently. The abstractions press that familiarity through a second transformation: light bent across physical surfaces, the image losing fidelity the way memory does as it passes from one body to the next.

Moreover, each generation is a closed system—shaped by inherited conditions it did not choose, separated from the others by time, silence, and the slow drift of misremembering. The work sits with what it means to coexist within a lineage—to carry someone else's crisis as your own nervous system, to find that the people who shaped you are both closer and more foreign than memory allows.

The work does not stop at the print either. As an installation, How to Burn a Memory is conceived as a spatial body—one you move through, interrupt, and leave changed. Large-format transparency prints hang from the ceiling on invisible wires, spotlights cycling between front and back illumination on a timer so the images appear to breathe, never fully resolving. A Super 8 projector casts footage across the full length of the room, throwing light onto walls, floors, and the bodies of visitors who pass through it—fragments from different eras drifting into partial alignment before separating again. At the center, a hand-built machine threads film through a mechanism that weaves and unweaves in continuous motion, casting shifting shadows across every surface it touches.

Finally, visitors are invited to stare at a single image for one minute, then turn to face a large white square on the wall. The afterimage—burned into the retina—appears there, visible only to them. It exists nowhere but inside their own perception. This is where the series arrives: not at an image you look at, but at one you carry out with you, briefly, in your own body—the way trauma travels.

To better illustrate the above, a fully functional 3D virtual environment has been built to demonstrate the complete spatial experience of the installation here: coreydziadzio.com/fractured-reminiscence---how-to-burn-a-memory.