EXERCISES IN RECONSTRUCTION (2025)

​Materials: 3D-printed transparent PLA and photoluminescent PLA (with magnets), video installation (1'11") in mp4 player

 

We build an affective archive from pieces we’re not sure even belong together.
Sometimes, remembering is an act of invention.

This project takes the form of an open-ended, collaborative puzzle.
There is no image to follow, no predefined structure, and no promise of completion.

These pieces do not necessarily fit. They resist the logic of traditional puzzles.
Here, misalignment is not a flaw, but an entry point.

Because memory doesn’t operate through precision.
It is uncertain, shifting, and fragmentary.
We remember in pieces:
stories interrupted, details blurred, gestures recalled without context.
There are things we’ve been told, things we imagine, and things we’ve absorbed without knowing how.

The puzzle becomes a site for affective archaeology; a process of uncovering emotional residues rather than objective truths.
Each piece acts as a trace, of the impulse to reconstruct, to hold on, to make sense of what remains unclear.

This work is guided by the metaphor of the palimpsest; a surface that has been written on, erased, and written over again. In a palimpsest, fragments of previous inscriptions remain visible, coexisting with the present.
It is never clean. Never final.

Each new contribution to the puzzle overlays or disrupts what came before.
The archive grows—not toward clarity, but toward complexity.

What emerges is not a fixed structure, but a living system of relational fragments.
It is a record of attempts:
to remember,
to reconnect,
to translate emotion into form,
to hold space for what was lost, imagined, or unspeakable.

The puzzle invites participation, but not to complete a picture
rather, to engage with the experience of not knowing,
of placing without precision,
of contributing without control.

It is an exercise in surrendering to the unstable, the partial, the invented.
It is an invitation to reconfigure what memory can be;
 

Because sometimes, what we invent
is just as necessary
as what we remember.