To work with an archive is to work with decisions someone else already made — what to record, what to discard, what to call a thing. The material arrives pre-edited, and the first job is to read those edits as carefully as the contents.
Provenance is a story
Every object carries a chain of custody, and that chain is itself a narrative: who held it, who moved it, who profited, who lost. Making that chain visible can be more radical than the object on display.
What gets kept is an argument about who matters.
Technology lets us hold more than we ever could, but abundance is not memory. Memory is selection plus care. The work is deciding, again and again, what deserves to be carried forward.
Written by Chidirim Nwaubani — March 2026
