This project investigates the medium of archiving as a repository of memory, offering the opportunity to explore a postcolonial identity through the lens of food. The food in focus will be the rambutan – where the rambutan will be dissected, investigated and reflected upon relative to personal memories. The archive will be used as a medium for memoir, allowing the process of research as labour to consume me as one would consume the rambutan. Through investigating the nature of the archive and questioning what is considered ‘archival material’, an archival framework rooted in personal ritual in connection with the rambutan is developed – within which, this project sits. Four steps in the ritual become four sections of the archive, each categorising four different forms and themes of archival material.

Shaped by an experimental research process, the final document will question the western, clinical approach to an archival process, archival material and their categorisations, leading to new archival material being created. Key research questions revolve around how to structure an archive, looking at examples in both the academic and artistic world, and then reflecting on how findings pertain to the structure of this particular archive. Investigating what an archive should be, the document will be interjected with personal notes, injecting oneself into the archive, and presenting the archival notion of a scrapbook-cum-journal. Drawing reference from Lutz Bacher’s binders which present personal documentations of her research and her process:

‘Each binder [corresponds] to works and exhibitions made by Lutz…containing handwritten notes, correspondence, reference materials, working documents, and other ephemera. Lutz constantly revised the binders, returning to the binders of earlier works to add new reflections, as well as to dig up old, unrealized ideas anew.’ (Nick Irvin, 2021)

The project also materialises the tension in using the archive as medium between self-exploration through categorically investigating material and as research develops, then resisting the urge to break free from the confines of the archive’s initial framework. What happens when the archivist wishes to break free from their archive? To deconstruct the archive so laboriously built by one’s own effort? The beginning of this dismantling is seen in pieces that find themselves in an order which feels slightly wrong. These questions reference the work of Walid Raad in particular, where data and histories are shared through the notebook of a fictional character, interrogating the notion that an archive which is not wholly based on non-fiction does not render the material any less real.

Reflecting on this year’s theme, the project connects with the idea of repetition and seriality as I will be exploring multiple facets of identity through the rambutan in relation to its range of presentations – whether through looking at the rambutan’s representation in art, my own memories of picking the fruit and the emotions connected to this ritual, and it’s framing as a commercial product in the Western world, these are a few of many ways in which the multiple identities of the fruit, and thus myself, will be dissected and, ultimately, archived. The four sections within this project may also be considered as a series, with each section developing upon the last in its approach and material documented in relation to the rambutan.