A paper folder “doll house” — A childhood narrative
Vita Yakovlyeva
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
MEMORIAMEDIA Review 5. Art.1. 2020
photo: Vita Yakovlyeva / Memória Imaterial edition
As an investigation of memory, this visual essay seeks to create a connection between an individual experience of childhood and its social setting through engaging a narrative as a form of representation. The autoethnographic narrative constructed here revolves around a paper doll house created in the interior space of a common file-folder by the author in her own childhood. Looking thirty years back, the author attempts to decipher the meaning of her paper doll house within a larger context of childhood as a social construct, available to her largely through her recollections, claiming that an embodied narrative is as much a reflection of self as it is of its context, and vice versa.
Keywords: childhood, memory, narrative, temporality, Ukraine, autoethnography