Tyler Henry was away from New York City on the night that Hurricane Sandy hit, in 2012, but he saw the storm unfold from a distance on social media. As Henry saw photos of Jane’s Carousel, in Brooklyn Bridge Park, being consumed by a flood, he thought of his studio, which was near there, in the basement of a nonprofit gallery and artists’ residency called Smack Mellon. When he drove back the next day, he realized that he had been right to worry: the artists’ studios had been submerged under seven feet of water. “It was not only completely submerged but also destroyed,” he said. “The power of the water was so strong that huge, heavy items had been tossed to the other side of the studio.”
The artists wouldn’t move back into the space for more than half a year owing to renovations. But, immediately, they began to take stock of what was damaged and lost. Henry and another artist, Adriane Colburn, began collecting some of the materials. She found a dollar bill floating in the hallway, ringed with rust; he found a VHS tape of Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” which his roommate had given him. There was a box of Kodak film that Henry had bought at a flea market in Philadelphia—maybe forty or fifty reels of local family history that he’d never ended up using—that was now waterlogged.
Eventually, Colburn mailed some of these objects to San Francisco, where they became part of a nascent collection: “A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting.” The archive, started by an artist, Amy Balkin, in 2011, is a participatory collection of objects and materials that have been “contributed by people living in places that may disappear because of the combined physical, political, and economic impacts of climate change, primarily sea level rise, erosion, desertification, and glacial melting.” Anyone anywhere in the world can mail in a contribution, as long as it weighs half a pound or less; the things they send can be “natural, manufactured, found, made, or discarded, including trash.” Contributors are invited to send some details about the object’s origin, and how that place might be threatened by climate change, and also any notes about the specific object. In the course of the past ten years, more than a hundred items have come from places such as Antarctica, Cape Verde, Cuba, Greenland, Italy, Nepal, Panama, Peru, Russia, Senegal, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, and the United States. A hundred and eleven of these objects were recently on display at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, as part of a larger exhibition, “Beyond the World’s End,” about social justice and climate change.
In the museum, the archive appeared small at first, housed in an L-shaped display table that took up only a portion of the room. But, as I approached the table, it became clear that the collection was quite vast, a sweeping array of objects spanning time and place. There was a fire-extinguisher inspection tag from Anvers Island, Antarctica; there was a Nepalese flag; there was a jar of confetti from the Venice Carnival. There were pieces of seaweed, mussel shells, a large mango seed. There were children’s toys—a truck, a plastic bird, a stuffed dog caught in fishing line that had washed up on a Miami pier. There was a brown glass bottle, retrieved from the site of the Rim Fire in California, and a crumpled wrapper of an Australian candy called Snakes Alive. There was a single black slipper, waterlogged, that had been found in New Orleans’s Upper Ninth Ward, and, from Campbell, California, behind a small protective covering, a single wing of a butterfly.
The collection is made up of ephemera, personal possessions, documentation, organic matter, trash. It is hard, in writing about the archive, to avoid the impulse to list and list and list; it is the only form that seems to capture the too-much-ness of encountering these disparate objects and trying to make sense of them as a set.
Each object in the display was marked by a numbered pushpin that referred back to a list of descriptions, written by the people who had sent the objects in, about where something had been found or why it had been sent. A contributor wrote, of fragments of red stone, “This firebrick was collected near the site of a house on Constance Estate, Trinidad and Tobago, that was destroyed and claimed by the sea. The ruins are still visible in the waters of Columbus Bay.” For sheets of stamps patterned with fish, the description reads, “Thanks for the email and interesting project you are undertaking to promote countries like Tuvalu vulnerable to climate change and sea level rise. We will send 3 full sheets no charge.” For an eroding ring of keys, found on Carolina Street, between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets in San Francisco, and mailed in 2016: “Remnants of a set of keys, metal keys, common in this time.”
More and more museums are collecting in the midst of crises. Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, museums increasingly began to undertake contemporaneous collecting—gathering objects, documents, photographs, and testimony immediately in the wake of a major event, or as it unfolds. In the past two decades, this mode of collecting—nowadays often called “rapid-response collecting”—has become the norm everywhere from local history societies to the Smithsonian. Three days after the September 11th attacks, New-York Historical Society employees began collecting artifacts of the attacks on the World Trade Center. After the 2016 massacre at the Pulse night club, the chief curator of the Orange County Regional History Center, Pamela Schwartz, said, she immediately wrote a five-page collecting plan. “When I first heard about it, this had not yet become ‘the most lethal shooting by a single gunman in modern American history,’ nor had it been labelled ‘terrorism’ or ‘the deadliest hate crime against the American L.G.B.T.Q. community,’ ” she said. “But I still knew history was happening right before my eyes.”
“Preserving the present could be the only way of guaranteeing the future a past,” the museum curator and scholar Steven Miller wrote, in one of the first treatises on contemporaneous collecting, published in 1985. Rapid-response collecting had a particular heyday during the pandemic, when individuals and also institutions were struck with a near-mania for documenting what were being called “unprecedented times.” Certain objects—masks, ventilators, thermometers—became freighted with significance during the unfolding crisis of the pandemic, so much so that whiskey bottles turned hand sanitizers, only a little more than a year old, already feel strangely dated, tinged with the sense of “early quarantine.”
Crisis often heightens the sense that we are living through history, though of course we always are. Rapid-response collecting does not always happen around major events, and can incorporate the day-to-day; in his essay, Miller argued for archiving bell-bottom bluejeans. These days, the Library of Congress is archiving memes. But our framework for history and collecting still remains largely centered on events. In the context of the climate crisis, which touches everything, which seems to be unfolding both rapidly and slowly—through sudden disasters and also on the scale of geological time—drawing any kinds of boundaries feels impossible.
Perhaps this is why a polyphonic and democratic approach to such collecting seems fitting. Balkin, who as an artist has approached issues around the climate crisis and the environment in a variety of media, first invited contributions in 2011. Since then, she has continued to solicit for the collection, working with other artists and circulating the archive at venues around the world. “The archive works when it’s circulating, so it needs to circulate in order to function,” Balkin said. When it’s not travelling, the collection lives in a public storage facility in San Francisco.
“A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting” has some things in common with rapid-response-collecting initiatives, but, unlike most, it remains extra-institutional and participatory. It is not time-limited, and it has no pretenses of being comprehensive or extensively vetted. (Balkin said she had no interest in acting as a gatekeeper for submissions.) But this is not to say that the collection is completely disorganized or random: Balkin records the objects’ points of origin, down to longitude and latitude. She also organizes the archive into sub-collections, based on nation, and then divides them further into annexes, based on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s annex categories, which outline different countries’ commitments for mitigating greenhouse-gas emissions.
Beyond this, though, “A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting” seems to offer no particular logic other than showing us some fragments of our threatened world, culled from specific places at specific times. Many pertain to particular extreme-weather events. One artifact in the collection, for example, is a receipt for a one-way train ticket from Jessnitz to Freiburg, in Germany, from someone who had travelled to help her mom with a house. On the way there, she had not been able to reach the town because the flooding was so extreme that the train station was closed. This is a document of a discrete event—a disaster—but it can also be read as evidence of the longer and slower disaster of the climate crisis. This duality—weather that is both immediate crisis and long-scale catastrophe—is part of the experience of living through this period of ecological disaster.
Looking at the receipt for the train ticket, I thought of Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “A Guide to Berlin (1925),” in which a writer imagines his city through the eyes of future travellers:
In the present, in this archive, every trifle already appears significant. Even the trash is ennobled and justified, less by its age than by what it might portend for the future.
In May, I watched two museum employees, Everett Ó Cillín and Marla Novo, disassemble the exhibition and pack the archive into sixteen storage boxes. Wearing nitrile gloves, they removed the plexiglass from the display cases using suction cups and matched the objects to their compartments. “It’s a little like a scavenger hunt,” Ó Cillín said, easing a whale-bone structure into an archival box filled with protective paper. Novo wiggled a wooden toy truck into a protective plastic sleeve. There was something strangely elegant about the customized compartments for each object, and the neat, gentle way these things were slotted into them. As I watched Ó Cillín and Novo pick up the objects, following instructions about their care and packaging—Novo slipped a mussel shell into a small bag that read “Mussel shells, 2 of 2” in Sharpie—the word “tender” kept coming to mind.
These objects, after all, require a certain amount of care, especially when many already arrive in some state of decay. One artifact in the archive, Venetian seawater preserved in a glass bottle, contains its own ruin, as the water has eroded the bottle’s metal cap. There is something of a paradox here, one central to the archive’s project: decay is both a problem to be managed and a necessary feature. After all, it is an archive of sinking and melting and burning and crumbling; these objects may be arrested in some kind of stable state, but many of them have already been subjected to those processes.
I thought about this again when Novo lifted a fragile, dried piece of seaweed into a plastic sleeve, inching it in slowly to avoid breakage. Naturally, this piece of seaweed would have already fallen to pieces; it was meaningfully dead when it arrived. And yet, here it was instead, given a kind of afterlife as a testament to destruction in a particular place and time. When I consulted the object list, I learned that it was freighted with an entirely different kind of meaning. It was found in Burton Bradstock in the United Kingdom, in August, 2014. The sender wrote:
I looked up Charlotte Blackman. There was little written at the time that connected her death with climate change, though much has been written about the effects of cliff erosion in Dorset. There it was again: the strange disconnect between a singular crisis and the larger scale, the difficulty of reconciling the two. Online, I found a photograph of Blackman, a smiling young woman in a hat, and a local news article about how her family was outraged that the mementos they had placed on a memorial bench—flowers, a teddy bear, a plaque—had been removed. Here instead was this seaweed memento, nine years later and thousands of miles away, likely a tribute from a stranger.
There is an incredible pathos to Balkin’s collection of things. In the light of imagined future eyes, tinged by loss, all manner of things become relevant that would otherwise pass unnoticed. Even two beer-bottle caps, in this context, are mesmerizing. Both are from places that are threatened with a certain kind of disappearance, or, at the very least, radical change; through their corrosion and fading, they seemed to foretell this disappearance somehow. And yet, paradoxically, looking at them, I knew that these pieces of metal would likely outlast me. A future person might see them in a museum, displayed with a label that reads “Beer-bottle caps, common in this time.” But what would that person’s world be like? What would be lost, between now and then, even as these fragments are shored up against ruin?
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