On

We are, I think, for reasons that are not altogether clear to me, standing sentinel because we are encountering not a treasure in quite the same sense that Arendt suggests here, but something like its distant echo—the rumor of a mode of life we’ve forgotten or been denied. 

We appear to be both obsessive documenters of our experience, yet largely indifferent to or overwhelmed by the archives we create.

History written by the victors offers glimpses of marginalized figures, for whom we need to “fabulate” stories to “strain against the limits of the archive” and “represent lives… through the process of narration.” Building relationships between things is a form of authorship too.

offloaded on to others whose experiences are less visible or less privileged.

“

we

cannot change.

“we do not believe we can create compelling pathways from being harm doers to being healed, and to growing.

“we do not believe we can hold the complexity of a gray situation.

“we do not believe in our own complexity.

“we do not believe we can navigate conflict and struggle in principled ways.

“we can only handle binary thinking: good/... See more

We look at them with a lesser hold than we do things that sit in formal archival structures. But, understanding that all of these things are intertwined and that there are ways of honoring bodies of knowledge that don’t fit into the archive has always been important. This project tries to draw on that concept, and on archives that exist within phys... See more

We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment.