Ilya Kabakov Response
A personal archive is a collection of anything that brings value or sentiment to an individual. These objects may look ordinary or customary to others, but they hold memories and nostalgic feelings that only the individual can explain. The stuffed animal bat, in particular, was not made special. It was a mass production toy from China and sitting on the toy rack of a souvenir shop in Colorado. However, this bat holds the memory of my grandmother and going on vacation with her. The pile of wrinkly sticky notes with stains on it may look like random messages to a stranger, but for me, they were memos that my mother wrote to me and put in my lunch when I was in elementary school. Typically people would keep old letters from relatives, but I also kept the envelopes because they held the same value as the letter itself. The envelope had the address of the last place my grandmother lived. As we get older, no matter how healthy we stay, our memories will fade, and holding onto physical objects is what keeps those memories alive.
