Tides of Rematriation
ALCES's larger, ongoing project of transnational monuments and memory work — each installment bringing a diaspora community home, connecting descendants with the ancestors they carry across an ocean.
Allihies Copper Museum, Beara Peninsula, Ireland — site partner for the project's first installment.
A framework for coming home
Every migration leaves two kinds of distance behind: the physical miles between two places, and the harder-to-measure distance of memory, generations, and the stories that get lost in the space between them. Tides of Rematriation is ALCES's ongoing effort to close that second distance — building monuments and memory work that connect a diaspora community's descendants directly with the ancestors, places, and histories they carry.
Each installment of the project centers a different community, a different ocean, a different act of leaving and returning — but all of them share the same underlying question: what does it actually take to bring someone home, long after the leaving?
The project's first installment, American Wake: Filleadh, centers the Irish diaspora and labor organizing in the American West, opening simultaneously in Allihies, Ireland; Butte, Montana; and Laramie, Wyoming.