Elia S

Messud searched for her father's memories in a physically and mentally reconstructed Beirut, reconnecting to her father's yellow note only through old ruins and mostly imagination of what it must have been like.

On a similar journey on the life of my own father the force of re/construction of urban landscapes became quite apparent.

On the one hand I could not but feel fortunate, that the places I was seeking in Sardinia had hardly changed, all streets the same, most houses the same, the same people, sharing their memories.

On the other hand, in Bratislava the only "reconnection", as in Messud's essay, was a utterly modern 70s area, with some vague matching of the street plan, and only imagination left to fill the gaps.

We live In an era when we have overly detailed video/photographic memories of most days of most recent years of most people around us, And yet we have made our memories of the not so distant past shorter, vaguer and emptier, by erasing city plans, buildings, inadvertedly moving communities, their relationsips and their memories.