what’s a piece of wisdom you carry that you want to share with others?

Before We Forget is a participatory installation that invites visitors to contribute personal pieces of advice — fragments of knowledge, experience, or care that have stayed with them. The project is rooted in a desire to surface emotional and embodied knowledge in public space, the kind of wisdom often passed hand to hand rather than stored in archives. It draws from the long-standing practice of oral tradition where knowledge is passed on through stories, across generations, at kitchen tables, in markets, and in moments of care or chance encounter. By giving these forms of knowledge a visible presence, the project affirms that storytelling is not only a way of remembering, but a way of staying connected to each other, and to the values we quietly carry. In a time when narratives are increasingly fragmented or flattened into soundbites, we are interested in preserving stories not through text, but through symbolic abstraction inspired by weaving traditions, graphic abstraction, and storytelling motifs that can cross languages, ages, and backgrounds. The aim is to have a collective voice rather than sticking to a certain language that represents a certain group of people. 

By inserting a process of collective storytelling into the context of the market, we invite market-goers to reflect not just on what they are buying or selling, but on what they are carrying, offering, or learning. The result is a growing spatial structure that reflects the people who pass through it: not as consumers, but as carriers of experience. It functions as a public memory surface — ephemeral, unfinished, and fundamentally collective.