Losing Civilisation Archive is an ongoing project that emerges from personal experiences of loss to examine the importance of mourning to living through an investigation into the connection between mourning, memory and the archive. This work explores whether loss is something that as individuals and societies we can or should get over and considers that grief connects us to a universal groundlessness that might hold the promise of a deeper understanding of the human condition and existence itself.

One task is akin to that of the archaeologist, of excavating fragments from the psyche, taking them from context, classifying them and then placing them into an indexical system contained within the archive. The confines of an archive hold much promise: the activity of perceiving disparate parts in relation to one another being a process of concept-creation, producing possibilities for endless possibilities.

Memory is a strange thing, lost in denials, lost in the hypomnesic apparatus, affected by trauma and extreme emotion. According to Freud, memory is destroyed by the Death Drive’s backward thrust to an original state of being, before birth and life take place. The preservation of memory through archival activity might be understood as a compulsion that is driven by the knowledge that memory is being lost; that eventually all will be lost.

Underscored by a psychoanalytic inquiry into loss and mourning, this work investigates archival activity as having its roots in loss, trauma and a compulsion to repeat that signals a struggle to come to terms with death and to survive it. Utilising the psychoanalytic concept of the dialogue of mournings that posits that the function of art is its access to loss, questions arise concerning whether the archive can be conceptualised not only as a work of mourning but as a dialogue of mournings. This work also reconsiders the conceptualisation of the archive as a hierarchical framework for the organisation and display of objects, extending it to one that is decentralised and which considers and frames personal processes and relations of human encounters within the structure of the museum as a mode for display.