from the archive: compilation as a gathering of selves.
on the self undone, unfurled, and ultimately reconfigured.
November, 2020 | Whilst curating for my portfolio to heighten my chances of securing a job in a global pandemic, the subject of compilation and its intimate relation with disassembly, disfigurement, and remembrance, have occupied my thoughts. Illustration by me.
I have found myself on a brink. Some sort of cusp that has placed me in a position to pause. To wonder and to gaze. To suddenly realise that I have found myself in a moment of sorts. Had there not been a storm outside, I would've expected myself to be settling into a new job somewhere by now. I would not have stayed here for this long without certainty of a plan for the future. In other words, had there not been a storm outside, I would not have come home. I wasn't meant to support my family in the way that I am right now. I wasn't meant to settle some of the storm inside our walls. I certainly didn't intend to keep playing intermediary for long-forsaken turmoil. The wounds have dug too deep to heal.
I have saved no one, but it is a miracle that I am with my own people in this moment. I hope that someday I will look back on these few months with baffled fondness. There is something miraculous in granting sense to what absolutely does not make any sense. I am rubbing salt between my thumb and index finger in anti-clockwise motion.
To uproot is to pull up entirely the skeletons, the bloodstreams, the bloodlines, and the soil from which we have emerged intoxicated. In this moment, I indulge in acts of compilation. What is it that I know I can hold onto? What is it that I know I have full control over? What new ways can I look at what I already have?
I do not shy away from broken pieces. I have never been made so entirely in the first place, so I feel that I have nothing to lose. I've never been broken in the 'origin' sense; I have simply never known the completeness that others take for granted. The kind of completeness that comes incased with a childhood home, generational heirlooms, and archives of pasts. I am a configuration of multiple places; an arrangement of this and that compiled and released into white—
Self examination and reinterpretation has often come together. But this hasn’t meant an abandonment of origin or my own sense of self. I have wondered whether I have ever been inauthentic or deceitful, but i know in my heart I never have been. I do have an innate fear that I am the one to have abandoned others. But I remind myself that without constant reexamination, I might well have lost myself. I have just had to move past things quicker than I might have liked to.
Packing is an art form. Furniture is moveable; space is arbitrary, growing and shifting depending on circumstance; bowls never quite escape from cracks; lost commodities have a way of being unearthed five years on. Before each new move, we rummage through items, armed with a packet of label stickers and a dying permanent marker. I think in piles and in folded shirts. I am forever, inevitably, creased.
I have found that 'gathering' occasions a simultaneous dismantling of parts. A complete overturning is never without emotionality— unless you are heartless and faithless. In order to reorganise a drawer, we must pull the whole ordeal out, create little piles on the floor of 'keep', 'bin', and 'cherish'. Not everything in the drawer is easy to digest. I'm sure I'm not the only one to have found yourself on the floor quite literally in tears from a single photo, a diary entry, a note written by an old friend. But in taking out each of these items one by one, the process of dismantling is ultimately what gives me the courage to pull them back together, often taking rearranged shape, inevitably altered. Stringed together, things are peculiarly linked; some things, I guess, really are only discerned when confronted absolutely. The disparate and their strange correlations...where arrangement must in some sense involve deconstruction.
That strange process of collecting past things and placing them in arrangement with each other... I have always taken to this task like a duck to water. It feels like a ritual. I remember the first time a teacher assigned us the task of writing a curriculum vitae in middle school. In my head, I had a list of arranged items I knew to include. It wasn't necessarily that I had achieved far more than others. It was simply that I had bracketed the years behind me already. I remember how others around me did not know how to arrange their selves. They asked questions vocally, expressed honestly that they did not know what to write. I remember thinking how utterly 'much' I was and I remember covering my work up with my hand, half ashamed.
There remains a part of me that is ashamed anthologising settles me. I am part angry that acts of compilation have become life buoys. Since when have I been sinking? Since when have I been a scattering of selves, a constant set of halves?
People always ask me how I organise my bookshelves. I have never been diligent when it comes to books and sometimes try to unpack the reasons. Perhaps there are no reasons. I like how books overlap when stacked. I like that Zadie Smith titles touch the backs of JG Ballard and sci-fi collections. I like when zines hold hands with Shakespeare. I imagine what Sartre would think if he knew that on my bookshelf, his neighbours are Tilted Axis Press. I don't care what Sartre thinks. These are the shapes in which I mould my own abstractions. There is so much familiarity in one's own collections that we lose sight of what should or should not work. To lose sight is here a good thing, I think.
When the unlikely enter conjoined territory, something incredibly special happens; in my mind, it's almost sacred ground.
Lists and packed boxes and the strange arrangements I form of myself— these are my only remembrance, my only archives, and my own heirlooms. When I put myself to work in these anthologising ways, I pay homage to my own origin story. In gathering what I know and what I trust from what cannot be trusted (including parts of myself), I feel that I am giving myself the gift of vulnerability. I have never once told myself that 'this arrangement is the final one'. I would be a fool to assume I will not one day return to rearrangement. This is a never-ending patchwork in the making. What I do tell myself is that I must give all of me to the very thing I am tearing up to reassemble even if that 'thing' is me.
thank you for sharing your beautiful words ❤