Rafael Roncato

I wrote an essay for the new digital publication Networking the Audience by @triggerfomu, in collaboration with @photographyandsociety and @aalto_photography.
In it, I explore MEMEry — where meme meets memory — as a living, collective archive shaped through images in circulation. Not just jokes, but fragments of resistance. Tiny, volatile capsules where humour, trauma, and politics collide.

We live inside a storm of networked propaganda, where facts blur, and histories get rewritten in real time. Yet somewhere in that chaos, memes detonate. Not always, not all of them, as sometimes we just need to laugh, scroll, and survive. But sometimes they hit differently. Like photographic grenades, carrying compressed emotion, critique, and remembrance across platforms.

This text grows out of my own practice, especially Tropical Trauma Misery Tour, and from the Brazilian memetic wave that erupted during the 2024 Olympics to Oscar’s winner Ainda Estou Aqui and its actors (@oficialfernandatorres and @seltonmello ), folding cinema, humor and resistance to erupt the film’s resonance.

The publication exists in two forms: an online issue and a Telegram edition, because meaning shifts depending on where images land and how they travel.

You can read it via Trigger (fomu.be/trigger) or on Telegram (t.me/triggerxmaps)

With contributions by:
@fentasy.jpeg
@len.a.holzer
@benj_morrison
@donaldweber
@elenakrukonyte
@catalina__torres
@therewasbeatrice
@theofficeofalinalupu
@patriciakuehfus

Big thanks to the editors and collaborators:
@willboase
@andreastultiens
@tom.viaene.31
@photographyandsociety
@aalto_photography
@fomuantwerp
@eline.adriaensen
@heyitsabel

Dive in, scroll slow, let the memes linger.

#MEMEry #VisualCulture #DigitalResistance #Memes #networkingtheaudience