In the early 1990s, while working as a young multimedia designer, I took part in a series of hologram photography projects for an art exhibition in Toronto—laser-light images suspended in glass, each holding a frozen volume of space. A three-dimensional world captured in a two-dimensional frame: you could peer into it, but never enter it. Shift your head and the perspective changed; details appeared, then slipped away. Convincing, mesmerising—and yet always beyond reach.
Lately, I’ve been thinking of memory the same way, particularly as it is conscripted into national identity. Just as a hologram bends light into an image that appears to have depth, nations bend heritage into shimmering projections of history, tailored to the emotional and ideological needs of the present. The subtleties of lived memory—the contradictions, the awkward particulars—are flattened into spectacle.
In the United States, Make America Great Again is not history. It is a light-show of flattering angles: frontier myth, industrial swagger, cultural primacy. Its genius lies in its vacancy—an open vessel into which each believer pours their own vision of “greatness.” Behind it: ICE raids, National Guard deployments, police lines—state force turned inward, fascism draped in the flag.
In Israel, the script is more declarative: enough is enough—the time has come for the Jewish people to take what was promised by God, once and for all. Centuries of persecution and the Holocaust are compressed into a single, all-defining clause: existential threat. Under this grammar, plurality flattens; survival becomes the whole sentence.
In Gaza, the projection is reversed but structurally familiar. It is the position Israel once occupied—stateless, embattled, refusing to vanish—yet now trapped at the opposite pole of power, its voice filtered through the barrel of Hamas. Culture survives, but under a syntax of erasure.
All these are paradoxes. All are holograms. Their pasts are not simply remembered—they are mobilised. Mobilisation happens most efficiently through language games. Make great again sidesteps when, exactly, was this? and replaces it with an emotional reflex. Promised land turns a geopolitical reality into a sacred inevitability, closing debate before it begins. From the river to the sea crystallises identity into a single, maximalist demand. Such phrases are portable, repeatable, unyielding—compressing a vast, contradictory archive into a rallying cry.
Cultural identity becomes ammunition. Memory, filtered through selective language, is repurposed into usable myths. Belonging is framed as a resource to be defended or claimed—not a shared inheritance to be tended. The past is edited into a weapon, aimed outward at enemies and inward at dissenters. To question the projection is to risk expulsion from the identity it claims to protect.
The danger lies in the hologram’s seduction. It offers the comfort of coherence, the satisfaction of a single, clear picture. But its light is angled toward the audience, never the whole room. It asks for loyalty to the projection, not engagement with the messier truth—that heritage is never one story, but many; tangled, contradictory, carrying both heroism and harm.
On the scale of nations, memory is disciplined—herded through the gates of selective language until it speaks with one voice. Neuroscience tells us memory is reconstructive, always edited in recall. In politics, this malleability is a tool: narratives are engineered to fire the same neural circuits until reflex becomes entrained identity. Patriotic slogans are not careless poetry; they are deliberate neural implants, compressing centuries into a single trigger.
This is not heritage in its natural state. Like the hologram, it offers the illusion of depth without cultural substance. The contradictions, the polyphony, the fractures—erased. What remains is a projection engineered for nationalistic power, not truth. Its language does not illuminate reality; it bends it—inviting division, chaos, violence, and the widening of social fault lines. It is intentional, and profoundly unethical. The work is to reject the slogan, reject the projection, and see it for what it is—to trace its language back to the machinery that bends it. Cultural memory is nuanced, personal, expansive, open to interpretation by every individual. Through our own critical analysis, we can enlighten our families and communities, making them less susceptible to the illusions of power—restoring memory to the living, where it can be questioned, shared, and remade with agency.
