Memory Palace
Memory Palace is a program for survivors of sexual violence, built with and for marginalized communities. It uses storytelling — film, art, a printed zine — to help survivors process trauma on their own terms, while chipping away at the stigma that keeps those stories silent.
THE CHALLENGE
Building a creative campaign around sexual-violence survivorship is delicate work. Push too hard on the message and you risk re-traumatizing the people you set out to serve, or turning private pain into spectacle. Layer on the silence that stigma forces onto marginalized survivors, and the hardest part was never the design — it was earning enough trust for anyone to share their story at all.
“The goal was never a finished piece of art. It was the moment a survivor saw their story treated with care.”
THE APPROACH
We ran the program in phases. It opened with participant outreach and trauma-informed training, then moved into healing sessions grounded in wellness and ancestral practices. From there, each participant was paired with an artist to turn their story into something they could see and hold — captured through film and a printed zine — and the work culminated in a community event where it was revealed. None of it would have held together alone; we leaned on partners across advocacy, research, and healing practice to do it responsibly.
participants
portrait artists
practitioners
artists
THE OUTCOME
Four survivors moved through the full program, each paired with a portrait artist and supported by 13 practitioners and a dozen contributing artists. The deliverable was never the point. What mattered was the moment each participant saw their own story rendered with care — and a working model for how creative work can carry trauma without exploiting it.
NEXT PROJECT
Artist Connect
Indie Things Possible — Platforms