Losing Civilisation Archive, was a response to the sudden loss of my beloved father. This work archives the struggle to preserve what was left behind. Prompted by this loss, the archive developed out of a disposition to identify and classify, the drive being to safeguard memory, to commemorate my loved one but also a desperate attempt to ‘find’ him. Whilst exploring archival activity as an expression of mourning, an interdisciplinary work emerged, consisting of labeled objects in cabinets, prints, books, animation and video. I performed a journey in the video - a walking with the dead - in psychoanalytic terms, what happens to a person who is unable to cope with their losses to the extent that they withdraw from normal life and choose to exist psychically in the realms of the deceased.

In the film Losing Civilisation, my walk is punctuated at different points with a series of rituals that are carried out as: conversations with my father; silent invocations; appeals to a higher force; yearnings and longings; reparations; remembrances. As a dialogue of mournings, a psychoanalytic term that encompasses Lacanian ideas about art as lack, lack becoming an object born out of absence, it is intended that this work not only allows others access to their own grief but that it holds the potential for concept creation and the transformation of the ideas within it, so that new meanings can occur indefinitely, keeping the work alive. This is the promise of the archive.