Ephemerality in Personal Memory Travel: Encountering the Changing Environment

This article approaches personal memory travels with the aim of investigating people's encounters with the changing environment in relation to time. It centers on the intra-actions with perceptual ephemera as immaterial non-solid entities to argue that our relational reality is a cyclical, dis-continuous process of past and present encounters. The study is grounded in the post-humanist performativity approach and based on personal life histories of memory trips gathered in Slovenia with the help of in-depth interviews and photo-elicitation. Findings suggest that travelers' engagements with ephemera at site illustrate complex entanglements between human and other (immaterial) entities as co-constituted in time and from within time, provoking the production of situated and temporally sensitive knowledge about the more-than-human world. The article endorses the significance of memory work and human engagements with absences and resonances, both allusions to other (past) contexts, as fundamental for cultivating post-anthropocentric attitudes and advancing the habit of timefulness.