For those in between cultures languages homes worlds
shrine is a research-led tool for people who live between cultures — to hold their memories, trace belonging, and understand who they’ve become.
Living between cultures shapes how memory works.
When life unfolds across languages, places, and social worlds, memory rarely forms a single, linear story.
It shows up as fragments: a scene, a sentence, a smell, a voice, a feeling. From decades ago. From yesterday.
For those living between cultures, these fragments often carry multiple meanings at once, and belonging can feel split across places.
Meet shrine
A private autobiographical system that helps turn memory fragments into meaning.
FRAGMENTS
Small pieces of lived experience.
Moments, memories, thoughts, recent or decades old, shared as they surface.
REFLECTION
An ongoing conversation with memory.
You can talk, write, or speak with shrine about what a fragment holds or brings up.
MEANING
Connections that emerge over time.
shrine helps reveal patterns across places, relationships, and phases of life.
How shrine becomes spatial
An autobiographical world shaped by memory and meaning
shrine brings memory fragments into a personal landscape where moments, places, and feelings are present together.
The memory map holds patterns of time, place, and experience so you can sense how parts of your life relate across your world.
Through layering of experience, patterns emerge for you to explore their connections and discover what your memories reveal about the shape of your world.
How shrine is being developed
Research-led and built with care
shrine is an ongoing research project developed through interdisciplinary work across memory studies, human-centered AI, immersive technologies, and participatory design.
It is shaped in collaboration with researchers, cultural institutions, and individuals living between cultures.
The current phase focuses on learning, testing, and refining how to support autobiographical memory responsibly over time.
Research-led
Grounded in interdisciplinary research and qualitative methods.
Built in Europe
Developed within European research, legal, and cultural frameworks.
Privacy-by-design
Designed with care, consent, and long-term trust at its core.
How to take part
An open invitation to explore and collaborate
shrine grows through collaboration across research, creative technology, and lived experience.
It brings together people working with memory, identity, AI, XR, and cultural systems, grounded in the principles of digital humanism and a value-based approach to the design and evaluation of technology.
We invite contributors who want to explore, question, and shape the project’s future directions through research, experimentation, and thoughtful making.