A few nights ago, River and I found ourselves talking about the world which, to be fair is not particularly unusual for us.
It started about how strange it is that we have never been more connected and yet so often seem further apart. Social media, politics, algorithms, outrage. Everywhere we look there seems to be another reason to divide ourselves into groups. Another reason to decide who belongs and who doesn’t. Another reason to reduce a person to a label.
Yet beneath all of that, we are just people.
People trying to get by. Survive.
People carrying joys, losses, fears, hopes, memories and experiences that shaped who we became.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that our roots are often shared. We may have grown up in different countries, spoken different languages or lived very different lives, but we all carry stories from childhood. Stories that linger. Stories that stay with us long after we leave them behind.
A place.
A person.
A tradition.
A trauma,
A joy.
A loss.
A moment that changed everything.
Or nothing at all.
That is where Hieroglyphs began.
Hieroglyphs is a living digital archive of childhood memory. A collection of individual stories from around the world, gathered together not to prove how different we are, but to explore what connects us.
We are inviting people to submit a single glyph: a childhood memory shared through writing, photography, artwork, audio or video.
Any language.
Any format.
Perhaps it is a field beneath a railway bridge. Perhaps it is a grandparent’s kitchen. Perhaps it is a tree, a toy, a classroom, a river, a song or a street corner.
Whatever it is, it mattered.
Our hope is simple. To use the internet to connect rather than disconnect. To unite rather than other. To create a space where strangers can recognise pieces of themselves in one another’s stories.
A wall built from memory and humanity. A reminder that, at the heart of it, most of us simply want a place to exist.
Any language.
Any format.
Every story matters.
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