Belongings
and
Memories
A Speculative Memoir
in Virtual Reality
by Carol Silverman
It happens every day across the world, survivors are left with the possessions of a loved one who has passed away. And then what? Give everything away? Sell what you can? Donate? Recycle? Landfill? Keep it forever? How to deal with a lifetime of objects? What if sorting through those things revealed a person different from the one you knew? You can never ask them why they kept these secrets. Maybe there is no one left who can tell the story of what happened. All at once, you have learned something you didn’t know and can never now understand. I made “Belongings and Memories” as a way to work through the posthumous mystery of my mother, who was deported by the Nazis as a Jew but owned a book called “Keep A True Lent” from 1953. Among her things, I found a silver filigree six pointed star necklace and a tiny statuette of a praying Mary she had kept by her bed. She was my closest relationship in life. I thought I knew her.
About This Experience
"Belongings and Memories" is an immersive memory box that uses the medium of virtual reality to bring an embodied immediacy to one woman’s life story. The viewer interacts with her personal photographs, documents, artwork, and possessions in an intimate space where time present and time past coexist in an interactive biography.
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A young girl, torn from her home at twelve and sent to an internment camp, fortunately rescued by her uncle and brought to safety. A mother of two who never spoke of her own childhood. A prolific artist working across mediums who produced ceramic and textile art, works on paper, and paintings, from the quirky and charming to the serious and sophisticated over twenty-five years of practice. A woman who disappeared slowly into dementia in her sixties. Ellen Rauh was all of these women. She had kept her traumatic childhood in 1930s Germany a secret so well that her own children only learned of it when they found a hidden box of photos and documents after her death. It revealed the barest outline of her fourteen month journey to New York from the Baden region of Germany after all the Jews there were expelled over four days in October of 1940. The bombshell discovery left them with more questions than answers, a mystery no one could help them solve now that the woman who had lived it was gone. All they had were their memories of the mother they loved and thought they knew and the things she left behind. Her belongings became their road map to filling in the blanks of her life.
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Artist Bio
Carol Silverman is a storyteller working at the intersection of material culture and technology. Her work centers on the narrative power of objects, exploring how the worn, used, tactile things around us reveal profound truths about ourselves if we take a moment to listen.
Carol's career as a set decorator for film and television informs her artistic practice through immersive engagement with material culture. She has worked across genres with a variety of directors, from Steve McQueen to Wes Craven, decorating productions ranging from Saturday Night Live parody commercials to the feature film The Hoax, directed by Lasse Hallström and starring Richard Gere. Her work on HBO's Boardwalk Empire was recognized by the Television Academy with four Emmy Awards.
Carol has been part of New York's XR community since 2017, engaging with the transformative potential of virtual and augmented reality for storytelling. She received her MFA in Visual Narrative from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2020.
