My friend Cara is, to say the least, a little obsessed with archiving and archives. This is another of the amulets that I made last March or April but never quite got round to blogging about. At the time, Cara and I were studying together and both getting lost on our own research journeys. During a group presentation, in response to Cara's feelings of frustration at the difficulty of finding a format in which to realise her work (and communicate a complex set of ideas), one of our tutors said "Cara, you need to remember that you are not the British Museum".
I loved the sentiment of this statement - the notion that any of us might need reminding from time to time that we are 'just one person', that sometimes projects grow and spiral out-of-control more quickly than we realize, that we (as individuals) don't need to replicate things on the scale of large institutions and that any one of us does not need to cover absolutely everything. Some things are always going to fall by the wayside, feel too large to even start or have the potential to become too cumbersome to ever complete (ahem... still not letting myself off the hook for not finishing things though! - see Amulet #33).
However, over a year on, I'm not sure how well this amulet has worked. Have a look at Cara's current project http://instability-in-stability.co.uk (where she has locked herself away in her loft for the last 3 months, investigating and archiving every object it contains) and judge for yourself. As you can imagine, even this amulet has been described, archived and added to the inventory, as has Amulet #17.
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