Corridors of Memory is a virtual reality work by Gus Drake, developed for the Groninger Museum exhibition Bakstain. The project centres on Overschild, a village in the municipality of Midden-Groningen that has become emblematic of the gas-extraction earthquake crisis. In the village core, around 80% of houses are condemned for demolition, while others are heavily structurally damaged.
The consequences extend beyond material collapse. As homes are dismantled, psychological, cultural, and environmental dimensions are affected. In this context, the home becomes a silent witness, absorbing years of routine, care, love, and tension. What disappears is not only brick and mortar, but the architecture of memory: corridors worn by footsteps, rooms that held voices, rituals, and moments of intimacy.
Corridors of Memory explores the friction between what is materially rebuilt and what cannot be replaced. Drake reconstructs threatened interiors as a virtual environment that visitors can step into. Within the VR experience, fragments of daily life, voices, and atmospheres emerge through sound and image, where memories are encountered not as representation, but as presence.
The work combines documentary trace with immersive reconstruction. Using high-density LiDAR scanning, domestic spaces are captured and translated into detailed point-cloud data, forming the basis for spatial reconstruction. Sound is treated as spatial memory: Drake records domestic atmospheres and oral histories, weaving these soundscapes through the virtual environments. A 360-degree film of one of the last standing houses in Overschild, recorded during demolition, offers an intimate encounter with a home in transition.
Drake’s engagement with Overschild is long-term and relational. Since 2019, families have given him access to their homes and lives, forming the foundation of earlier projects such as Ode to Home and Kroniek van Overschild. The trust and intimacy built over time are reflected in the careful translation of these stories into the work.
Gus Drake
Gus Drake is an Amsterdam-based interdisciplinary artist and photographer, and a graduate of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK) (2022). His practice is positioned at the intersection of landscape, memory, and technology, working across photography, installation, and immersive media.
Photography is his starting point, often within long-term, research-led projects that begin with the local and the particular, domestic traces, surfaces, and micro-ecologies that carry histories of use. From these intimate observations, Drake connects to broader environmental and cultural questions around landscape and heritage.
Across his work, emerging technologies function as translation devices, making the invisible tangible and mediating between abstract information and embodied experience. Rather than presenting place as a static backdrop, Drake approaches landscape as an active agent, one that holds memory and shapes how we relate to our environment.
Collaboration is central to Drake’s practice. For Corridors of Memory, he worked closely with editor and software developer Aart Jan van der Linden on the VR platform, and with Freddy Peters on the animation of the 3D environment.