Week Nine
The Position
Week Eleven of the Reliquary Engine has me wrapping up the program... until the engine turns again.
In Memory Of: A Position on Objects and the Work of Remembering
In May I was thinking about the thinginess of things. Not symbolism — function. I wanted a clinical word for what I had already observed objects doing: regulating the restless hand, marking a threshold, standing in for something that couldn't be said. The souvenir seemed like the most common version of what I was after — an object that anchors an experience in time, that says I was there when memory alone might not hold. I was looking for a framework that formalized what I already knew objects could do. I thought the word prosthetic might be that framework. A prosthetic supplements a faculty you still have. An aid. An extension. Something that makes the existing capacity work better.
This program taught me I was describing only half of what objects can do in service of memory.
The souvenir logic is real and present in this practice. We Had Nothing In Common is exactly that — five bark specimens organizing what I do and don't remember about a single afternoon with my grandmother at the Japanese garden at the Chicago Botanic Garden. The pseudo-Latin binomials name my own failures: what I noticed, what stayed, what faded, what distorted, what I can no longer be sure of. These objects are autofictions, shaped by the act of making as much as by the memory itself.
But the program surfaced a second and harder claim running alongside it. Some of these objects perform memory on behalf of people with no prior connection to the subject at all. Anonymous Gifts was made for someone I cannot verify existed as a singular person, from objects I cannot prove all belonged to them, on the proposition that remembering is owed regardless. This is not souvenir logic. The souvenir says: I was there, this object proves it. The democratic reliquary says: I was never there, I have no prior connection, I am choosing to hold this anyway.
The reason I can make objects for strangers I never knew is partly because I have already made peace with the fact that my own memories are fictions. I am not claiming fidelity to what happened. I am claiming the act of holding regardless — for others, for myself, on the proposition that the holding matters more than its accuracy.
A memory prosthetic, then, is not an aid to remembering correctly. It is a device for committing to the act of remembering at all.
The pieces made across these twelve weeks have worked primarily through vision and cognition — objects that must be looked at, opened, read. The sensory territories that remain are less mapped and more demanding: touch, scent, patina, the object that changes with its keeper, the container whose opening and closing carries meaning. These are not decorative refinements. They are distinct functional propositions. An object that must be handled to be read performs differently than one that must be opened. An object that carries scent bypasses conscious recall entirely, as scent is the only sense routed through the hippocampus without a cortical relay first. An object that rusts, wears, takes fingerprints, darkens with handling becomes a different device over time than it was when new.
Touch. Scent. Patina and wear. Revealing and concealing. Exposure to loss through time. These are five territories, each a potential series, each testing a different hypothesis about what a memory prosthetic can do that a symbol cannot.
The question I started with in May has not been fully answered. The Reliquary Engine must keep turning...