Traces We Carry: Fragments Reshaped

Wildfire relief

County of Los Angeles (select only if your project has a countywide benefit) San Gabriel Valley City of Los Angeles (select only if your project has a citywide benefit) West LA

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

The January 2025 wildfires swept through LA communities, erasing not just homes but irreplaceable traces of how people lived—family archives, creative studios, vinyl collections, and intimate objects that held memory. People lost photo albums, artwork, handwritten letters, and countless fragments of daily life that shape how we remember ourselves and our connections to others. Traditional disaster relief addresses immediate physical needs like shelter and food, but cultural memory—the recordings, tools, and meaningful objects that connect us to our histories—often goes unacknowledged. Without spaces for intentional remembrance, these erasures compound the overwhelming work of rebuilding, leaving communities disconnected from the stories that once defined their neighborhoods and relationships.

Traces We Carry is a digital initiative built on Collectra's platform that enables those touched by the fires and their communities to collaboratively rebuild through collective memory. Using our "calls for memory", participants can invite friends, family, and neighbors to contribute photos, videos, audio recordings, and stories about places, people, and intimate objects that held memory.
This project addresses the parallel between physical and digital loss facing creative communities. Many fire-affected artists had already been watching their work disappear into AI training datasets without consent—and then lost their physical studios, works and archives in the fires. As participants gather memories, they develop skills for protecting their creative work across physical and digital spaces. The platform offers a pathway to rebuilding that honors what was lost while teaching skills needed to protect creative work in an AI-driven world.
The platform recognizes that "not everything needs to be shared" and "some stories take time"—providing spaces for when people are ready, or simply need to know the space exists. Communities control their narratives, decide how memories are shared or transformed, and can choose between public Memory Commons and private Shaped Memory Spaces, ensuring cultural sensitivity and preventing trauma extraction.
Our pilot launches with (working titles) Sound and Memory, Palisades Remembrance, and Eaton Resilience (neighborhood memories).

Traces We Carry will transform how LA communities gather strength from climate disasters. Rather than cultural memory disappearing with physical destruction, neighborhoods will have learned to collect, preserve, and reshape their stories collectively. Fire-affected artists and cultural workers will understand how to protect their creative work across both physical and digital realms. The pilot initiatives—Sound and Memory, Palisades Remembrance, and Eaton Resilience—will become templates for other communities facing similar experiences. Most importantly, LA will have developed new practices of consent-based, trauma-informed memory work that honors what was while creating space for collective remembering. Communities will know they can control their narratives, decide how memories are shared, and transform fragments into living memorials that strengthen neighborhood bonds and cultural resilience.