Over the course of the term, our project has evolved out of abstraction and into several specific lines of inquiry that have kept us busy and focused. Elias has spent much of the term focusing on public signage, with a particular focus on how public warnings/requests/mandates at this time seem both authoritative and highly vulnerable to the whims of the general population. He has focused his collecting largely on sites at which this negotiation seems most poignant and/or contested. This specific focus has developed as, throughout the term, he has sought to incorporate more of his own personal experiences into the archive, particularly to highlight the, somewhat paradoxical, relationship he feels with the public spaces he frequents. This relationship has become increasingly characterized by a simultaneous sense of overwhelming constraint – face-masks, hand sanitizer, social distance, etc. – and overwhelming liberation – thank God I’m out of the house, the earth is a beautiful place, etc. Elias has sought to document these personal experiences and feelings in a way that extends beyond his own lived experiences and is applicable to how all of our spaces have been changing in dynamic and visible ways.
The progression of Sam’s project of preservation has been similar to Elias’. At the beginning of this endeavor, Sam’s main focus of the collection was public-facing communications from local institutions (i.e. a newsletter from a bakery or an email explaining contactless prescription pick-up from a drugstore). How do local institutions conceive of and communicate their community role in this pandemic moment? Similar to the signage collected by Elias, Sam’s sources exemplify the tension facing local institutions – how does a store balance the need to maintain a neighborly image with the need to use frank, and perhaps forceful, language to ensure safety in the continuity (or suspension) of commerce. Preserving these communiqués will allow for present inquiry and future reflection on both how conceptions of the community were impacted by the pandemic and how local sights of community-building shaped our present experience. Over the course of the term, Sam, like Elias, has sought out more personal accounts of the moment. In the context of his particular inquiry, this means oral history interviews with individuals who work for local organizations and have been tasked with navigating the connection between institution and community. Though he is still in the process of seeking out and processing these interviews, Sam hopes that the shifting to personal accounts will illuminate the decision-making processes behind the aforementioned publications – how personal anxieties, priorities, blinders, and aspirations manifest themselves in the newsletters we receive in our inboxes. Thinking back on our initial goals for this term, we feel a sense of accomplishment. Both of us articulated early on that we were excited to push ourselves beyond our comfort zones. For both of us, this meant bringing our ideas out of abstract, theoretical space, and putting them into practice. We feel as though we have both consistently pushed ourselves to maintain linkages between theory and practice this term. Spending winter term learning about the various silences, biases, and contradictions that are endemic to the creation and organization of any archive, we came into this term keen on creating a more representative archive by experiencing the processes and flows of power that make archives such unique bases of historical knowledge and analysis. Key to our learning this term has been the examination of and reflection on the silences in our collection, to what degree they are a product of our own positionalities, the realities of this moment, or a combination of both. It is easy to understand within the confines of a 6-credit class that a complete archive is a fallacy. However, becoming comfortable with the smallness of our own sample, that its inadequacies and strengths will only be made clear with the luxury of time, has been a difficult, but ultimately generative process. Our weekly journal entries and class meetings have been really fruitful spaces for us to continue to theorize about our roles as archivists and historians, our positionalities as individuals living through the pandemic (in privileged situations, no less), and how preservation takes on enhanced urgency in times of crisis. Meanwhile, in our individual collecting, we’ve both been able to center practice as a means to embody our theoretical positions, continue reckoning with how we wish to contribute to the archive, and consider the material obstacles that discipline our archival practices and the implications of those constraints for the archive that we ultimately construct.
