Lost, and Found?
Lost, and Found?
2018
Photo Catalog, 46 Items
Story
I am a student worker at Olin College Library, a magical community space filled with creativity and collaboration. If you are somewhat shocked by this seemingly paradoxical description of a library, I recommend checking out our website! (but this post isn’t really about the library).
We occasionally send out HelpYou emails to remind the community of the “interesting things” in the lost and found cabinet located right next to the library entrance. You would think that most of these lost items would find home shortly after the email is sent out, but in reality, I see the same sets of items over and over again. They are just forgotten after all.
When I was told to do a project similar to Forgot Your Password? by Aram Bartholl, I felt deeply engaged by this notion of “presenting to an audience a contextual collection of forgotten (or lost) personal belongings”. The X-Factor of Forgot Your Password?, to me, was the manner in which the artist approached the audience. The title provokes the audience by softly implying that “your passwords might be here” which naturally leads to a deep dive contemplation of the meanings, implications of passwords and what it means to expose them to the public. I also paid attention to the unique medium the artist chose to use. Why would an artist create 8 volumes of hard cover books only to archive a few gigabytes of password?
In response, I created “Lost, and Found?”, a black-and-white photo catalog of 46 lost items from Olin College Library. It is an homage of Forgot Your Password?, but it is also my attempt to archive a unique moment of the library, the physical space, the community, and the people.
Unlike the original work, I chose to go with a series of photos and not with a list of texts. I did so because the scale of the lost items from the library was simply not comparable to that of the passwords from the LinkedIn incident. Additionally, I felt like descriptions of lost items would be significantly less powerful than a collection of passwords. While passwords inherently manifest themselves with unique personalities and characters, descriptions of things simply don’t go as deep in terms of implications. That’s why I ended up with images, to capture the vibrant spectrum and the diversity of items that I have unearthed from the library, including but not limited to: water bottle, camera, ski goggle, baseball glove, breadboard, and etc.
Nonetheless, I definitely adopted some ideas from the original piece that inspired me substantially. The title, “Lost, and Found?” is one of them. These items were lost, were found by some people. But did they really, actually, find home? Another one is the black-and-white style with an attempt to project the absence of my personal thoughts. The medium, too, was intentionally chosen to be a tangible catalog, perhaps to present a little bit of ambiguity so people can’t just figure out what exactly the items are before they open the catalog with curiosity to check them out.
p.s. Please visit the library and claim your items if any of the items happens to be yours!
