The scaffolding on North Bridge is finally down and I can see a 40-foot Black woman looking at me through the viewfinder of her camera. It is the advertisement for the exhibition Sandra George: Start from the Level at the City Art Centre. I pause in her giant gaze, a small subject in her line of sight, and offer mine back.

What do we choose to listen to every day? A year has passed since I stopped taking headphones with me when I leave the house, since I cancelled my Spotify subscription due to the company’s complicity with Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine. The music streaming platform’s founder, Daniel Ek, pumped millions of dollars stolen from artists into the German AI military company Helsing, which has active contracts with international arms companies supplying Israel.

I have always been interested in memory. In my writing practice, I cannot divest memory from culture and inheritance. Obvious personal entry points are the iconography of La Virgen de Guadalupe whose portrait hangs in the house of all my elder family members, or the distinct food culture of my maternal northern México…