Inherent Narratives in Ad Hoc Collections

Part of my portfolio includes this project called Weaving Narratives: Possessions = Autobiographies, it is an exploration into how any ad hoc grouping of objects has some kind of inherent narrative, albeit a selected and limited narrative; but it is a narrative nonetheless.

When I was a boy I remember my father keeping a box of items that meant a lot to him.  I keep a box like this too.  The Italian blacksmith that I apprenticed under also kept boxes of items, but on a different scale; when he died I got one of those boxes: we call it a storage unit in American English.

As I was going through all of the contents of the storage unit I realized that there were real life stories attached to these items.  Some of those stories are true, others might be true, and some of them are fiction (i.e., speculation).  I started calling the items from the storage unit the story of How to Be an Old Man.

This really influenced how I started to put things together.  In fact, I wanted to create an abstraction of the possible story behind all of this stuff.  I started to think about books I have read and how I like the books that give descriptions of the little items and objects that the characters possess; these little details made the story more believable, less artificial…some how knowing about the possessions of a person gives them a sort of credibility.

Anyway, the image above is part of my attempt at crafting a book without words, and it is potentially an infinite number of narratives that can be construed and re-construed in any number of ways.  Think about it…looking at the image above, how many different kinds of explanations can you come up with for a narrative that strings them together?

Check out the downloadable .pdf file (11 page excerpt) of this project, and mix and remix the inherent stories however you want.  You can also view this short video I made about the project.

More to come…