Who will miss you when you are gone?

Student Amy R. Gelera, Visual Communication Design,
Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture:

Who will miss you when you are gone?

If archives are suspended in time, do they ever cease to exist? They tell us more about ourselves and our current ways of thinking than we give them credit for. We believe that what has been spawned in our brain is our own, but is it? We are attracted to the new and shiny things. We are drawn to them like moths to a bright bulb and in that frenzy, we discard the importance of the basis that sustains us today.

This project was originally made for the ‘Other Pasts’ exhibition in Väre Kipsari Lobby gallery 2019, in which we explored archives and recycled the past by creating something new. I explored the idea of sketchbooks as archives of ideas and origins and from that point, created a series of Riso-printed posters asking the similar existential questions but connected them to my topic.

However, the idea is not mine, it was implanted there and spawned. I propose this as a call to reflect through our own practices and use of archives, to think about their value in the past and in future space and time, as we are still able to move through it and think about the possibilities of when we no longer are.