A Guide to Building an Archive in a Changing World (Fill Your Educational Void Vol. 2)

On personal archive, collective memory, memory work, time, and reality.

You are here, HERE, for what exact reason?

There are certain charms in stillness when the world is spinning too fast. It’s a gloomy Sunday afternoon. I spread myself on the couch, my eyes closed. I lay my head on my left arm, the mechanical watch my mom gifted me pressed against my cheek, tictoktic. Time rinses through my body.

In the past month, I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about the ways we (and I) interact with the world. From passive to active, we exist to witness, experience, document, and create.

(A little diagram I draw)

The experiences and scenes we witness are woven into our memory, shaping our interpretation of reality. I was introduced to the concept of ‘Memory Work’ while researching for this essay. Take a moment with me to think about these words:

MEMORY WORK

Of course, Memories, both personal and collective, are never a still pond nor a Pensieve. They are a palace built from constantly shifting bricks and walls, a living organic matter, an archivist busy organizing and compiling every single piece of experience and scenes we witness that we feed into it. Owning memories requires works.

It is probably the easiest time and the hardest time to own and maintain memories. We have a million different ways to document. Every single breathing second, millions of people are uploading, downloading, sharing, saving, reposting, printing, streaming, podcasting. The majority of these footprints, digital or non-digital, are documented somewhere, in the cloud (which we trust blindly), or in our brains.