{ collect* }
Often, when something new is erected in a neighbourhood, we think: “I can remember that there was something here before, but now I can’t remember what.”
Within contexts of urban struggle, how can pluriversal narratives be created and maintained through the collective memory of a place?
Collect*
Collect* is a manifesto for a social anthology.
Collect* is a form of production.
Collect* is a democratic practice.
Collect* is an anchor within local struggles.
Collect* is a container of multiple memories.
Collect* is the root of a series of words that may have different applications, but use this verb as their engine.
We propose to Collect*
To Collect* is to create a social anthology; one which records memories of marginality and the struggles of communities. A social anthology can become a collective device, a reference to re-invent everyday-life towards commonality, remapping the sites and alliances of resistance.
We propose to collect*, to engage with knowledges that have an intrinsic temporariness and are experienced through direct participation; the knowledges of the event, of the marginal, and of the experiential. We want to create a system to embrace these qualities, collecting a specific way of knowing, and to engage with collecting ephemerality in the present, beyond traditional mediums.
In doing so, we aim to democratise the process of constructing narratives and memories, challenging traditional processes of archiving and curating to allow multiple voices to come to the surface.
A collectivised collection.
A collectable collectivism.
A collected collectivity.
A collectivisation of Collect*
* The addition of an asterisk is a typographic solution that highlights the capacity of this root word to have potential suffixes loaded onto it to multiply its meanings.
