The Archive
My effort to organize death through Burial Sites is driven by what art historian Hal Foster describes as an archival impulse. The archive becomes a dynamic depository of knowledge that transforms its content into a utopic no-place. Foster also claims the archive becomes a fetish that is rooted in paranoia and self-indulgence. This is a response to Derrida’s Archive Fever, where the archive is presented as something that negotiates between the death drive and the pleasure principle by preserving the records of the past and embodying the promise of the present to the future. The archive is a means to feed a desire for immortality by granting eternal life through documentation. Here, the comparisons between the grounds of a cemetery and the archive are also clear as a space of projected permanence.
All archives are subjective, rooted in privilege, unfixed spaces, and contain gaps. No matter how extensive my endeavors are, I will never be able to document every burial site that exists. In the one-paragraph short story titled On Exactitude and Science, Borges describes a map that was created to the exact scale of an entire empire. This map was so large that when unrolled it covered every inch of the landscape, becoming a shelter for its inhabitants as it blocked the ability for crops to grow due to the lack of sunlight. The map is not the territory. In the same vein, my nihilist side reminds me that not everyone will get to be remembered. It is impossible.
What is the work made from this work?
An archive comforts anxiety that my endless journey to these sites will be lost forever if it is not given some sort of tangible material product. If I didn’t produce anything from my research, I let down societal expectations. After a period of traveling for this project, I sent out a thank you note with a short video slideshow to many of the people who I had connected with along the way. I received an email from a woman who had intended to forward my letter to another person with whom we were both acquainted. Her note said, “Do you remember that young American woman who traveled the world for cemetery matters? This is the result. Disappointing!” This hurt me. Since then, it has taken me years to find a final form for this work and negotiate my internal relationship with what it means to commemorate the dead. This is not a project that I want to share with the world without contemplation and careful work.
Even as I do create public documents of my experiences, this collection does not contain a complete list of sites I have traveled to, nor is it finite. While there is a first and last page of my collection of bound books, the project has no beginning and no end. One of the sites I intended to include in this project is the churchyard of Christ Church in Winnetka, IL. This is the same place that I mention at the outset of this text where I played as a child. My grandparents and aunt have their ashes interred there and I visited their plaques with my family during the winter of 2020. I brought my camera and took photographs as we walked around pointing to the names we recognized. When assembling Burial Sites, I thought this would be a perfect place in which to end because it is one of the cemeteries I most recently photographed. However, I could not locate the files on my computer. I examined all my hard drives and SD cards until I found one that was cracked. This is where the photos were stored. The images of my family’s markers, the only images among my vast collection, are now lost. Again, the archive will always have ghosts and gaps. Therefore, I keep pushing forward taking photographs of gravestones over and over.
It is important to me that Burial Sites finds new lives as it circulates to unknown audiences, spurring new exchanges, critiques, and questions in response to my images. I will never be able to point exactly to where my work will or has traveled, or where the dialogues I have had around these sites have led others. After all, the archive’s maintenance and creation are not enough. The use of the archive is its true preservation.
My effort to organize death through Burial Sites is driven by what art historian Hal Foster describes as an archival impulse. The archive becomes a dynamic depository of knowledge that transforms its content into a utopic no-place. Foster also claims the archive becomes a fetish that is rooted in paranoia and self-indulgence. This is a response to Derrida’s Archive Fever, where the archive is presented as something that negotiates between the death drive and the pleasure principle by preserving the records of the past and embodying the promise of the present to the future. The archive is a means to feed a desire for immortality by granting eternal life through documentation. Here, the comparisons between the grounds of a cemetery and the archive are also clear as a space of projected permanence.
All archives are subjective, rooted in privilege, unfixed spaces, and contain gaps. No matter how extensive my endeavors are, I will never be able to document every burial site that exists. In the one-paragraph short story titled On Exactitude and Science, Borges describes a map that was created to the exact scale of an entire empire. This map was so large that when unrolled it covered every inch of the landscape, becoming a shelter for its inhabitants as it blocked the ability for crops to grow due to the lack of sunlight. The map is not the territory. In the same vein, my nihilist side reminds me that not everyone will get to be remembered. It is impossible.
What is the work made from this work?
An archive comforts anxiety that my endless journey to these sites will be lost forever if it is not given some sort of tangible material product. If I didn’t produce anything from my research, I let down societal expectations. After a period of traveling for this project, I sent out a thank you note with a short video slideshow to many of the people who I had connected with along the way. I received an email from a woman who had intended to forward my letter to another person with whom we were both acquainted. Her note said, “Do you remember that young American woman who traveled the world for cemetery matters? This is the result. Disappointing!” This hurt me. Since then, it has taken me years to find a final form for this work and negotiate my internal relationship with what it means to commemorate the dead. This is not a project that I want to share with the world without contemplation and careful work.
Even as I do create public documents of my experiences, this collection does not contain a complete list of sites I have traveled to, nor is it finite. While there is a first and last page of my collection of bound books, the project has no beginning and no end. One of the sites I intended to include in this project is the churchyard of Christ Church in Winnetka, IL. This is the same place that I mention at the outset of this text where I played as a child. My grandparents and aunt have their ashes interred there and I visited their plaques with my family during the winter of 2020. I brought my camera and took photographs as we walked around pointing to the names we recognized. When assembling Burial Sites, I thought this would be a perfect place in which to end because it is one of the cemeteries I most recently photographed. However, I could not locate the files on my computer. I examined all my hard drives and SD cards until I found one that was cracked. This is where the photos were stored. The images of my family’s markers, the only images among my vast collection, are now lost. Again, the archive will always have ghosts and gaps. Therefore, I keep pushing forward taking photographs of gravestones over and over.
It is important to me that Burial Sites finds new lives as it circulates to unknown audiences, spurring new exchanges, critiques, and questions in response to my images. I will never be able to point exactly to where my work will or has traveled, or where the dialogues I have had around these sites have led others. After all, the archive’s maintenance and creation are not enough. The use of the archive is its true preservation.
Foster, Hal. “An Archival Impulse.” October 110 (2004): 3–22.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Borges, Jorge Luis, and Di Giovanni Norman Thomas. “On Exactitude in Science .” Essay. In A Universal History of Infamy. London: Royal National Institute of the Blind, 2004.