Before the Boxes

Hello Walkers— I was watching Silo when one of the characters said: Memory is our internal biography. Information that we’ve hopped up with meaning to tell us who we are. It is science fiction, and the idea is there to serve the plot, but I have been thinking about it since. Perhaps the records we keep are not memories themselves. They are material we use when telling ourselves what a place was and what it meant. Earlier this month, I stood in the middle of Kyojima Studio and made a three-dimensional scan of the space. The books were still on the shelves, the tools were on the workbenches, and the darkroom was still a darkroom. A few minutes later, I started putting the books into boxes. The scan caught the studio in its final working state. I worked there between 2024 and 2026. It was where many otherwise separate parts of my practice ended up sharing a room: photography, darkroom printing, bookmaking, programming, electronics, and all the small acts of building and organizing that…