ii:

Memory

“The genesis of each project is in the ashes of the last.” - John Akomfrah (Plaster Magazine, 2024)

There’s something in that line I keep returning to. I even have it written on the wall of the studio I share with A Collection Of.

For a long time, I thought each project or idea had to be completely new, disconnected from what came before. But these words are a reminder that fragments and memories of the past often spark conversations and ideas in the present. I was lucky enough to experience John Akomfrah’s ‘Listening All Night To The Rain’ at the Venice Biennale when working on a project with Burberry tied to their Headline Sponsorship of the British Pavilion 2024. That year, the British Pavilion was a powerful exploration of colonialism, migration, and climate change. What struck me most was how Akomfrah turned the pavilion experience on its head, inviting the viewer to enter from an alternative starting point (the basement) and confront difficult narratives of the past, often framed by imagery and video of moving water, signalling to what has gone before or left behind.

© Listening All Night To The Rain, Canto II by John Akomfrah. Image by Jack Hems.

In that same way, every project I’ve worked on has left something behind: an object from a collaboration, a book that shaped my thinking, or a question that sometimes stays unanswered. Interludes exists in that space, not to look back in nostalgia, but to explore the traces that link one thing ending and the next beginning.

For this first post, I wanted to start exploring memory, not as something fixed, but as something fluid. Like water: shifting, reflective and always in motion. There’s something in water that keeps drawing me in; it appears over 300 times in my phone photos and videos. Moving, never still, never gone. In its movement I see echoes of the past I carry with me, the questions that continue to move me, and the way ideas evolve, dissolve, and resurface in new forms.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Nightswimmer, 1998

Over the next couple of posts, I’ll explore projects from the past and what I’ve taken from them. Memory is an invitation to linger in that in-between space (the interlude): to notice what remains after a project ends, to explore the fragments, the questions that move forward. Because it is in those interludes that the next ideas begin to take form.

issue 9 Plaster Magazine 2024, photos courtesy Shen Tan.