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RECOLLECTIONS FROM MY 2019 DANCING SYDNEY EXPERIENCE Kay Armstrong
“Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.” Thomas Jefferson
An archive is ultimately a set of traces of actions, the records left by a life. Its form multifarious, but generally organized into some sort of literacy, so when consumed objectively, each item somehow sheds light on the larger whole. On the surface, it seemed a relatively easy task. However, I was to find that there was much more involved than just collating records and creating an inventory of ephemera. To begin with, I had great expectations – I’ll Marie Kondo the heck out of this, I thought, though I had forgotten that organization was not my forte and that opening one box was like, quite literally, falling down a rabbit hole. Hours disappeared, and I was no closer to an order or a sense of context for all of this, well, stuff. I didn’t realize how much I had kept along the way. How many boxes I had trawled across the 30 years or so of share accommodation. How much had survived (how much had been chomped on by my rabbit). How many pathways I had trodden.
