### Shared Ritual

“Traced Work” is a museum established in 2023. This museum invites you into experiences, stories and rituals through proximity (both digital and physical) to the objects that collectively tell our histories. These include my histories, belonging to the person writing this text, and your histories, the person reading it – as well as those of everyone else who participates in making the museum what it is. The objects in the museum include art works and everyday items, as well as books, sounds and spaces. Objects in the broadest sense. 

You are invited to co-write histories told through “Traced Work” by contributing your own object to the collection without it ever leaving your side. 
	
The “Traced Work” digital archive acts as a platform for the stories of our objects to be held and shared – and to be recorded in history. In addition to the online archive, an ongoing series of itinerant physical exhibitions, tours and events encourage bodily closeness outside our heavily digitalised lives.

### Prioritising Context

“Traced Work” prioritises the contexts in which objects exist and the stories that connect one object to another. Every object in our world has a physical and cultural context – these contexts help us to learn from and about these objects. 

In the “Traced Work” archive, records of each object include a context photograph (measuring approx. 1m2 space).

This image is intended to not simply show the object, but to trace an outline of the object in its context. For non-visual objects in the archive, accompanying images can show alternate representations of form and position, for example sound waves of an mp3 file, some sense of space-time positioning, and photos of spaces in which the objects were made. 

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### Decolonising the 
### Museum

As a museum, we embrace modes of display and encounter that allow people to experience realities distant from, but connected to, the present realities we are living in. Expanding our individual horizons and stretching across a sphere of experience and knowledge; learning from each other’s stories and objects.

“Traced Work” will consistently strive to avoid replicating the devastating methods of colonising and hierarchical institutions that ripped objects from their cultural and environmental contexts – and owners – in the name of linear knowledge building and progress, only for the objects to be controlled by elite managers, held in cold storerooms and accessed largely by hyper-privileged audiences. 
	
We can’t continue in this way. We need to think of new ways of experiencing historic objects that keep extractivist and colonial methods in check – and celebrate the care and knowledge of the objects’ owners. This is an intention of “Traced Work”.
	
### New Ways 
### of Classifying

Traced Work does not view material forms in our world as existing in a hierarchy of one object being more precious than another. Monetary association of cultural prestige – the dollar signs accompanying an object – holds no sway in this museum. 

The classification system used to allow navigation through the “Traced Work” digital archive is co-written by everyone who adds a work to the collection. The contributor (you) chooses themes that describe the story of their object, and these themes in turn allow another object to be connected to the collection. The themes also determine what can be searched for in the archive.
	
All you need to do is find an existing point of connection in the archive when adding your own object. A pre-existing theme to start the connection. Through this, we can all trace a bigger story that connects one object to another, and, through this, grow a community of stories.

### History isn’t Fact

In every instance of history writing, it is impossible to draw a clear and reliable distinction between what is fact and what is fiction, since every history is written from one of innumerable perspectives. Our realities are, at the most foundational level, subjective. For centuries, histories taught to new generations of the human species, particularly in the industrialised West, have been histories written by colonisers and elites pertaining to those who are colonised or disenfranchised.

The stories welcomed through “Traced Work” – fact, fiction and everything in-between – try to reveal broad and fluid truths that connect us as individuals, communities and species. Diaphanous strands of historical truth. These stories privilege humble ways of knowing. While a lot of research and intellectual energy goes into tracing the stories of the objects in the “Traced Work” archive, we also promote playfulness and parable in telling these histories. 
	
Importantly, we embrace open dialogue and disagreement, and the learning that comes from connecting our many stories together.

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### Crediting the 
### Maker

Alongside every object, we include a ‘notes’ section to ensure all makers, artists and knowledge-holders are clearly credited in the archive and for any facts or research notes to be included.

### What we
### Mean by “Traced Work”

“Traced Work” takes its name from a patchwork of ideas in our world, starting with how we trace something by following a line of enquiry. To 'trace' is to track the progress of something from one point to another, and perhaps back again. We also trace things by copying them, usually by putting a piece of transparent paper over an existing image and drawing it into its new location. In these two definitions, you can trace something through investigation and through replication. Both of these associations are relevant to the activities of “Traced Work”.

The concept of 'work' sometimes refers to a thing that has been made. We might then refer to works that are held in museums, which have been made by artists or craftspeople, as examples of ‘their best work’. "Traced Work" tries to disrupt this idea by signifying that the works platformed through the digital museum are, in some form, replicas – they are digital copies of objects existing out in the world somewhere. The objects in the collection are not unique works, they are traced works – replicas of unique objects that emphasise the stories held in the objects rather than the rarity of the objects themselves.
	
'Work' also relates to the process undertaken to achieve an outcome, and, quite often, we use this term to mean the effort we carry out to gain the sorts of financial income needed to exist in contemporary society. Work is then tied to capitalist profit – it is effort undertaken which makes profit minus the small fee for my labour in alignment with the priciples of growth economics. 
	
But beyond this income association, could we think of the idea of work as something more expansive and ever-present? Not just the effort we put in to make money – but also the effort we consciously put in when trying to live fulfilling lives and build communities. Could we see work more like it is described by the Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to the sculptor Auguste Rodin in 1902: ‘to work is to live without dying’. 

Our work is our lives – the constant effort we put in that deserves to be noticed.


Please help to celebrate the launch of the online museum space for Traced Work. RSVP: traced.work@gmail.com

We will talk about the process of designing the Traced Work digital space and how it, in turn, is in close dialogue with the physical materials, activities, and exhibitions of the museum, including the recent exhibition “Grief objects”. We will also discuss opportunities for working together through this platform in the months and years to come. So, please do come along.

Traced Work

“An Object”

“TRACED” Launch