JULIA ZURILLA

Tide of Memory is a multimedia project composed of Sea Crest, Black TOM, and White TOM—video works that combine digitized 8 mm family vacation footage with turbulent ocean imagery and environmental references. Installed through opposing vertical monitors, circular framings, and immersive projections, the project explores memory as a drifting and unstable territory where nostalgia, environmental fragility, and historical rupture converge.

At the center of the installation, the sea operates both as landscape and metaphor: an immense and shifting surface where fragments of personal history emerge, disappear, and resurface like unstable currents. Archival images of idyllic vacations in South Florida from the 1950s and 1960s are interrupted by storms, abstraction, darkness, and visual ruptures, transforming leisure imagery into a reflection on vulnerability and loss. The use of circular windows and suspended imagery evokes portals, vortices, and binocular vision, suggesting memory as something partial, unstable, and constantly in motion.

The titles Black TOM and White TOM reference the 1916 Black Tom explosion in New Jersey—an act of sabotage that became a symbolic point of rupture in American history. Through this historical echo, the installation reflects on catastrophe not as a singular event but as an underlying condition embedded within landscapes, archives, and emotional memory.

By juxtaposing domestic archives with environmental and historical references, Tide of Memory proposes a meditation on disappearance, displacement, and the persistence of personal and collective memory within increasingly fragile environments.

The video installation consists of a large projection titled “Tide of Memory,” which gives the project its name. This main piece interacts with two opposing videos, “Black TOM” and “White TOM.”

"Tide of Memory" is a special solo project installation for the Women Photographers International Archive WOPHA Congress 2024 at the JW Marriott.

Technical Setup and Production: Rafael Núñez