This is our second Issue from our resident ARTIST Da:ze

 harvesting archives

introduction

Photos sitting quietly in the gallery, scraps of sentences crowding the notes app, sketches pressed in-between journal entries, quotes underlined and abandoned waiting in the darkness of a book shelf. all of these are essential to the creative process as a way of life.

despite their disjointed nature these collected glimpses of reality provide insight into the deep undercurrents of our attention. viewed together they reveal patterns and themes that our day-to-day consciousness might overlook.

to say upfront this practice is mostly inspired by harvesting as shared by Maggy from Regarding Dew. i recommend you to go and dive into her Gentle Musings on self-referenced living.

Harvesting is an intentional acknowledgment of your growth so that you may bear witness to your own sweet evolution. The ground of fulfilment is tilled in solitude. This bounty is yours, relish in it!

Maggy "Harvesting your insights”.

here I'll mostly focus on my personal experience of it.

purpose

I love imagining my posthumous retrospective. curators digging through my journals and sketches, surviving friends lending my letters and artworks to the galleries (hopefully paid), young dewy-eyed closeted artists discovering that it's not too late for them. researchers piecing together the timeline of my life, tracing its footprint across my works, cataloguing them into displayable categories. i'll be dead by then though.

And it— it can turn out that, yes, some artists have created art that has really survived thousands of years
And that's fantastic, but experientially, for them
They are dead, they are gone, they are not experiencing that

David Cronenberg for "No One Lasts Forever" by Charlie xcx

i'm alive now. i can't help but notice the active shift of responsibility in this fantasy. i love it, i hope it comes true. but while i'm here, present on this earth in both body and soul, i'd love to take my stories into my own hands. enter the harvest.

one can distinguish two types of adventures i take through my messy archives: a quest and an expedition.

quest for a specific vision

A couple of years ago i put on a party called "i love you.". it was based on a tag i had been doing at the time and veered into my explorations of soft hyper-feminine aesthetic. i needed flowers, lots and lots of them for visual enrichment of the environment.

i have a strong preference for utilising my own archives rather than using stock images. this time was no exception. i pulled up all the photos and videos i've taken since i signed up for cloud backup. so many flowers: big and small, luscious and minimal, real and hand-made, in nature and breaking through walls.

once i had big enough of a pile I put them to use as projected visuals and prints adorning the surfaces of the space.

even though such a quest has a single focus, in sorting through the accumulated media you will find forgotten memories and adjacent ideas that might have otherwise remained in oblivion.

expedition into the forgotten

This option is closer to harvesting as described by Maggy.

an especially good activity for empty, unmotivated and uninspired days, this sort of expedition into one’s own archives can reignite feelings long left in the past. here you assess one piece of ephemera at a time and categorise it to your heart's desire. i'll offer you some questions to reflect on while on your metaphorical walk.

pick any pile. digital piles can be particularly convenient, as wandering through them can take place in bed. what do you see? what do you screenshot? what bits of reality do you tend to capture? is the way you capture shifting through time?

how is your working space looking at the moment? sketches, books, even materials themselves. look at your pens, paints, collection of papers. when did they come into your life? what were you looking for in them? when have you used them last? maybe today is the day for some swatches.

do you keep journals? pick any one of them, the order doesn't matter much. pick a month, a week, or even a few random days from different journals. in my journaling experience, by the time the next sentence begins i forget what i wrote in the previous one. imagine the extent of thought you might encounter when you revisit your old thinking trails. face courageously what you were going through at the time, remember that human development is non-linear, see the patterns revealing themselves, welcome the spiral nature of time.

note that i do not necessarily advise this to be an opportunity for cleaning. unless you're particularly inclined to tidy or create clean categories and marked piles, feel free to throw it all back into one mess. what matters is the effects of the reencounter with your past self.

conclusion

3 Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. 4 As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. 6 But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. 8 Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. 9 Whoever has ears, let them hear.”

Matthew 13:3-9

let me leave you with this: daily life is messy. it can be hard to track the long-term shifts when our focus is limited to the immediate events. now and again we have to make time to assess our personal and creative trajectories, and read messages we sent ourselves from the past. treat such time as an adventure, because it is one.