Collected Topographies
What does it mean to keep desire alive against systems built to erase it?
I have been secretly collecting the accidental creative outputs of my time spent with loved ones - trappings of clay, scribbles, doodles, and collaborative drawings. I wondered how I could generate more of this secretly beautiful and seemingly unimportant creative output across my community and capture it, so I developed a framework. Collected Topographies are born out of very specific creative constraints, very specific and strict instructions, and ritual (most often in a park).
This archive includes collaborative drawings, scribbles, and others are maps I’ve made through this framework. I then took photos and scanned the resulting maps and calcified them in 3D software to create sculptural tangible artifacts borne out of a fleeting and ephemeral process. The goal is to create a specific container that allows for - and gives permission to - the experimental and nonsensical subconscious substance that is most often tamped down post adolescence. In a world when everything is over integrated - so much so, that our very own desires are flattened and replaced with attention capturing mechanics, we need containment with discernment, and permission to fail. Collected Topographies is an exercise in this particular balance: one where people can feel safe surrendering, knowing that a container is being held. Within it, we can begin to peel back the layers of the subconscious to reflect what our desires really are in a particular moment. This is ultimately the way to understand ourselves and reconnect with our creative intuition - the most important key in the survival against algorithmic flattening.
This practice offers an alternative to sharing in networked spaces that are not dependent on platform capitalist technologies. It is a way to rethink digital tools when it comes to archiving.
This is a work in progress. As of September 2025 I am working on archiving, scanning, and presenting my captured collected objects, drawings, and maps that will be presented with New Art City’s virutal platform.
See it here inside Avatar Lilith’s Memory Garden.