issue 43|archival enlightenment

I had been working for more than a year on this collage.

I made it meticulously with beautiful materials: Pink and gold Japanese paper. A pressed flower I had gathered years ago from a poet’s garden.  Fragile materials. I used special glue to bring them together. Archival, naturally, promising to last a lifetime.

I had also applied gold leaf, forming little islands across the layers of paper. A process that demands care and patience. Care, I do have a lot of. Patience, not so much.

My piece was spectacular. Ready to be framed. Perfection.

I destroyed it. That one morning, I felt the need to undo it.

I looked at it intensely. It didn’t feel right. Structure, symmetry, sharp corners, … I started pulling at those signs of perfection. The glue was resistant. I tore it apart, piece by piece, the sound of paper ripping, echoing through the walls of my studio.

I did remove the flower first—
That’s the only part I couldn’t bear to destroy. I placed her next to the pile of torn paper.

What remained was a strange sense of truth. 

My body had reenacted how I’ve been learning about my own past—Accidentally, in fragments, through coincidences. Structure doesn’t make sense when your life has been built on chaos.

Did you know chaos comes from the Greek word kháos (χάος) — meaning “gaping void”, “abyss,” “emptiness”?

Chaos is built on absence.

In Une part de ma vie, a collection of interviews from the 1980s, French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès— who died of AIDS in 1989, talks about how the French language, like French culture in general, only interests him when it is altered. He says that a French language colonized by another language would gain new richness— and being the complex and among the most critical writers of his time that he is, especially speaking up against racism in post-colonial French society, Koltès uses the word “colonize” here purposefully, not to glorify the idea that the act of colonizing enriches, but that a colonizing power like France should more than any other have the humility to accept that having its language and culture being altered by others is an act of enrichment. What I find particularly fascinating is how he dives deeper into the idea that such loss, such dismemberment, is a gain in beauty; he likens the process to a statue missing its head and arm, drawing its beauty precisely from that absence.

Chaos is built on absence. And in such an environment, revelation thrives in coincidence.

It is through fragments, through conversations out of the blue, that I’ve learned about my many roots— a great-grandparent from Kyrgyzstan, another from Crimea, grandparents from the Balkans, others on the move to Syria. I look at old family albums: they are like the unwritten novels of our lives, each face a new blank page for my imagination to fill.

When my grandmother was still alive, we used to watch Turkish soaps together. Sometimes in the same room — when I would visit her, in Istanbul, where I was born, or when she would visit my mother and my aunt, in Brussels, where I grew up. Other times, at the same hour but in different homes, and we’d call each other, commenting on the melodrama unfolding on our screens, caring for invented people as if they were our own flesh.

Once, as we were watching Kurt Seyit and Şura, a series set in revolutionary Russia, she suddenly said, “Your great-great-grandfather came from Crimea.” Then, without losing a beat: “I made muhallebi, it’s in the fridge, go get some.”

Such moments of archival enlightenment happen through our consumption of popular culture, and also when we are driving in a car. In movement. It doesn’t matter where we go, or for how long. The moment the engine starts, the radio switches on— and so do the stories. Each new story triggered by a song we hear by chance, or something we see through the window. The longer the journey, like the time I drove from Brussels to Turkey with my father, the more the puzzle of our heritage begins to take shape, to turn into a landscape. It is a gigantic puzzle, with many missing pieces.

Our landscapes are always filled with absence.
(But remember: we established, with my favourite playwright, that absence is beauty.)

Those of us whose families have always lived in movement will know what I mean. The ones who don’t will have to trust my word.

By coincidence, I keep finding pieces of my story scattered— across landscapes, songs, people’s memories. Each discovery creates a fragmented understanding of who I am. But maybe that’s the only way to know ourselves when our histories have been lived in movement.

In her book M Train, Patti Smith writes: “If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time?”

Dear Patti, I think the real time you mention is the archive— built upon fragments and coincidences. Alive and breathing today. To me, building an archive is an act of love— an attempt to fight mortality and erasure, to create beauty out of absence.

And it is a process of pain; 
archives remind us that we are aching—
And it is a process of care; 
archives remind us that we are loved—

They live in our attics, in our playlists, in our drives through cities we half remember. They are the layers of who we are. And once we start sorting through them; the folders, the boxes, the lists, the back-ups, the emotional clutter, they strike back.

I go back to my collage—
dismembered, torn, all the broken pieces stacked upon each other.

“Your past is a tool, not a definition,” New Orleans writer Maurice Carlos Ruffin says. I wrote his words down with my fountain pen in gold ink— they’re pinned on the wall overlooking my work table, next to the shelves with a stack of boxes. I look at the pieces of my collage lying on the table, then up at the quote, —Your past is a tool, not a definition— and my eyes wander to one of the boxes: copper-coloured, like the cezve my grandmother used to make coffee in.

I open the box and find a faded sepia photograph almost a century old. An elderly woman, her head covered in a white veil, holds a baby in her arms. I turn the photograph: A pencilled note says it is my grandmother, two months old, in the arms of her grandmother.

I carefully place the photograph on top of the mountain that has become my collage.

I go get the glue and continue working.

This poetic essay was performed at the Mezrab in Amsterdam on 24 October 2025. With special thanks to writer and artist Rasha Hilwi, the host of that evening’s programme, who has invited me to tell a story on the theme “Coincidence”.

A FEW THINGS THAT MAKE ME THINK AND FEEL…

• “Artistry involves cruelty,” Martin Scorsese tells filmmaker and writer Rebecca Miller in the five-part documentary series Mr. Scorsese on Apple TV+. Maybe it’s because of her own biography (Miller is the partner of Daniel Day-Lewis and daughter of Arthur Miller) that the connection and trust between the two is palpable, add to that her work and vision, the documentary is a deep dive into Scorsese’s rich life work. If you are, like me and millions of other cinema lovers, fascinated with Scorsese’s cinematic world, this series is one not to miss. 
  
  

• Technology impacts not only our lives, but politics, society and culture, and that is why I love reading Dense Discovery (DD) every week. I have followed its founder, Kai Brach’s work for a long time, when he had launched the magazine Offscreen, already focusing on the human side of the tech world. He continues the work with DD where he presents thought-provoking content. I like it more and more that he takes a stand for a better world and isn’t afraid to just name what is wrong with our societies and technology. Like in issue 361 where he laments on how content that isn’t particularly good manages to get our attention, and he invites us to do better: “Seeking out lesser-known voices isn’t just an act of cultural curation; it’s a philosophical stance, a refusal to let attention be the only metric that matters. Because the most interesting stuff usually happens on the margins.” That’s also what I am trying to do with my own artistic and writing practice, and this newsletter. 
  

• A recent podcast episode of BBC radio’s Start the Week (13 October 2025) focuses on Endangered languages and vanishing landscapes and is a fascinating listen on how and why languages disappear. One quote particularly moved me in this conversation, when one of the speakers said that languages don’t die, people do. And she related this loss to the violence that is being done to populations across the world. 

ABOUT + SUPPORT

Canan Marasligil (she/they) is a writer, literary translator and artist based in Amsterdam. She established the attention span website and its newsletter to publish their work independently: making the time to reflect, analyse and imagine.

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