At our first meeting about the new project, we brought finished references: book covers, photographs, maps, and a few books we liked. The conversation moved quickly, but everything seemed to point toward familiar answers. Before opening the layout file, we agreed on something simple: spend an afternoon walking without looking for a specific image.
The starting point was a question about memory and movement. We wanted to understand what people choose to keep when a place changes. Instead of beginning with formal interviews, we mapped a short route between the station, the market, and the street where the old bicycle repair shop stands. Each person carried a notebook and a task: write down words, look at signs, photograph textures, or record sounds.
A walk without a fixed script
At the station, the first note came from a poster partly covered by another one. Only a phone number and the word “repairs” remained visible. Further along, a fruit stall had written prices on cardboard scraps of different sizes. These were not extraordinary discoveries. They were signs of use, made to solve a problem that day — and perhaps that was why they felt so precise.
At the market, we asked for permission before taking photographs. Some people preferred not to appear; others were happy to talk as long as their names stayed unpublished. We recorded the conversations without turning anyone into a character. Later, we wrote down what had caught our attention and added context to each image. This stage felt slow, but it helped separate what we had seen from what we were imagining.
The archive began when we stopped trying to prove an idea and started noticing what was happening around us.
At the old repair shop, the owner showed us a drawer of receipts, labels, and calendars from several years. We did not photograph the documents. Instead, we asked him to choose one object that could be described in words. He picked a small handwritten price tag. He said that his mother’s handwriting was still something he could recognize from across the room.
From observation to archive
Back at the studio, we spread the notes across a table. The images did not form an obvious sequence. To keep our selection from being driven by the prettiest photograph, we grouped the material by action: mend, identify, announce, remember. Patterns soon appeared. Almost everything that looked temporary had been made to last long enough — and many things lasted longer than we expected.
We made a spreadsheet with date, place, author, permission, and description. Alongside it, we kept a folder for approved audio and a separate document for observations that should never become public content. This care did not remove every doubt, but it made each passage easier to trace and gave us a place to discuss what made sense to share.
We also realized that an “archive” did not have to mean a finished collection. Some people changed their minds about images; one photograph stayed out of the selection even after it appeared in several tests. Another needed a more precise caption. Keeping those decisions with the material helped us avoid treating the process as a straight line.
What the form made visible
The project found an editorial structure after we noticed a rhythm in the notes: a page of observation, a small image, then a longer note. Instead of ordering everything by date, we placed records about the same gesture beside one another, even when they came from different days. The reading began to move between what had been seen and what had been told, without suggesting that one fully explained the other.
Typography came later. We tested a narrow family for short notes and a more open reading face for longer accounts. The contrast did not separate “fact” from “opinion”; it indicated different rhythms. Some lines felt cramped in print, so we returned to the captions. Cutting a sentence sometimes changed the meaning of a conversation, so each passage was reviewed with its author.
Printing a few pages at home also revealed an important limit: on screen, the images looked larger and cleaner than they were. In print, traces of use became marks without detail. We changed the photographs’ size and added clearer descriptions. The prototype showed that a visual choice is not purely visual when it changes what someone can notice.
A method that stays open
The notebook did not solve our first question, and that was a useful conclusion. It helped replace a broad idea about memory with specific situations: someone keeping a price tag, someone repainting a sign, someone who knows where to find a part when the shop is closed. These small details do not tell a whole story, but they suggest where a conversation could continue.
On future walks, we want to return to the same places at different times and ask what has changed since our first visit. We will keep dated notes, credit contributors carefully, and review permissions before publishing. We also want to leave room for the people portrayed to correct descriptions or ask us to remove material.
For now, the result is a small, incomplete archive. It gathers fourteen notes, nine approved images, two hand-drawn maps, and a list of questions we cannot answer yet. The final format may change. What remains is the habit of observing before organizing — and returning to the material when an answer seems too easy.