(Archive) (Re)Design with New Materialism

Crafting Desire

Social values are materialised by craft, becoming part of the material culture. As a dowry, the craft of the traditional Taiwanese bed documented the ideal projection of marriage from family and society – gender role, patriarchy, fertility, and heterosexuality.⁠

How can I, as a queer, relate to the traditional bed within my culture and what it represents? By deconstructing the power structure embedded in the bed norm, the bed became an open structure to which different stories and desires can be added. And by reconfiguring the elements used in the tradition, a new heritage was crafted to include queer desires and perspectives, passing on a relatively inclusive material culture.

The Moment of Glass

‘Archaeology deals in the material remains of society, in things, their associations, assemblages, environments and contexts (Olsen, B., 2012)’. Archaeology rebuilds the past world with research by analysing tangible objects and unpacking the history it hid behind.

Image beyond the timelines, how can we document the era we are now in the form of a singular object? How does individualised tendency in the industrial revolution and archaeology theory affect the way we position ourselves in the world? Based on the past and current world, I speculate a reality of ‘glass bottle as future synthetic fossil’, extend the material agency of glass and promote the value of crowdsourcing public history.