Co-Written by the House

Some spaces are not merely lived in _they live through us.

When I moved into this old Fredericton home, I expected shelter, not a lineage. Yet almost immediately, language began to move inside me. Poems arrived abruptly. Memories I never lived flickered like déjà vu. Then I learned that a writer once called these same walls home. And before her, another. This house has a history of storytelling _ as if writing is not a choice here, but a condition of occupancy.

This project, created in collaboration with audiovisual artist Charles Harding, explores the house as a living archive — an organism that absorbs and emits the traces of those who have passed through it. Through sound, video, infrared tracking, and sculptural assemblage, we search for the ghost-residues of creativity embedded in floorboards, corners, and inherited drafts of air. We treat every crack in the wall as a syntax, every room as a sentence. The house becomes both medium and collaborator.

We are gathering fragments: personal artefacts, whispered histories, stories that can’t be verified but insist on being believed. Charles composes the acoustic memory of these rooms _ resonance, hum, the subtle choreography between breath and architecture. I sift through the poetic archaeology: the presence within absence, the way disappearing leaves marks behind. Together, we rehearse a quiet séance for lived experience.

Not to reveal ghosts _ but to show how we are always writing alongside them.