In this first post, I want to indulge in some personal history–not for pure narcissistic pleasure, but in order to trace the way in which this project has grown out of my life experience. My drive to preserve objects, memories, hobbies, and ideas, in whatever shape or form, is, at its very core, a personal mission.
The Preservation Project began long before I knew anything about film or video and stems from experiences I had at a young age. As early as first grade, I was a compulsive worrier. My parents had decided to divorce, and from that point on, I began carrying a large number of bags with me to and from school. I didn’t think much of my behavior until my teacher, Mrs. Smith, took me aside during lunch one day and asked me why I needed to carry two purses, a backpack, and a duffel bag to school each day. In particular, she was concerned that among those contents was a new, unopened package of girls’ underwear. Stunned by her questions, I could only answer, “I need them just in case…” There was an unspeakable comfort in having all of those precious objects with me–my favorite baby doll, my clothes, my books–and I’m not convinced the desire behind the behavior was all that abnormal. (In fact, I think many adults engage in similar behavior, with laptops, water bottles, PDAs, and backpacks today.) In retrospect, I think I was trying to make sure all the things I valued wouldn’t disappear. I wanted to hold on to what I most cherished faced with the uncertainty of divorce. Eventually the packrat impulse wore off, but the desire to save important things never relented.
Around the time I was in the 6th or 7th grade, my obsessive personality found new ways of manifesting itself. Having been introduced to the ideas of global warming and eco-consciousness in school, I became an avid recycler. I was a tree-hugging nerd. I carried around a stamp that I would put on all my assignments. And when our class went to a weeklong nature camp at Tremont, I quickly became enthralled with a book about mayflies or ephemerals, small insects that live above water for just one day before dying.
Moments like these come back to me and remind me that the path I am on was begun much earlier than the first time I held a camera. I didn’t know it then, but my life’s work was revealing itself to me in those moments of reading about mayflies and carrying around packs of spare undies. The driving force behind my life and the goal of the Preservation Project is to try to preserve things before they fade away. In short videos, films, photographs, and other recordings, I call attention to the small, often simple things, in threat of disappearance.
The intent of placing this project on the web is to make its contents accessible to a wider audience, to document the process of the project’s creation, and to further a collective effort to preserve things, remembered or forgotten, that might hold importance to future generations.
I, like the Japanese novelist Tanizaki, who passionately argues for the preservation of the Japanese aesthetic in his In Praise of Shadows, “ […] have thought that there might still be somewhere, possibly in literature or the arts, where something could be saved.”
Over 200 people cycled through the exhibit during the one-night show. Over 750 photographs were only display as well as a live projection of a 12-minute loop of Angela Singer’s 8mm and Super8 home movies.
