Collins, Jayme. “Enchanted Objects.” Archival Ecologies, season 1, episode 5, 22 July 2024. 29:45.
Archival Ecologies investigates how fires, floods, mold blooms, and other ecological events are affecting cultural collections and the artifacts and memories they preserve.
During the 2021 summer heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, the historic town of Lytton, BC, and nearby First Nations reserves suffered a catastrophic wildfire that took local archives, museums, and cultural collections with it. In this first season of Archival Ecologies, we’ll tell the stories of those collections and the communities who have stewarded them.
The podcast is created and hosted by Jayme Collins with research, writing, and production support from Jamie Rodriguez, Kavya Kamath, and Molly Taylor. Music by Hamilton Poe. Sincere thanks to Kouvenda Media for their partnership on this project. A production of Blue Lab with support from Princeton University.
Richard Forrest, steward of the Lytton Museum and Archives, reflects on the devastating losses sustained by the municipal repository. With a collection predominantly composed of paper photographs, ledgers, and other documents, very little survived the fire at the Lytton Museum and Archives. For Richard, the importance of these materials lay in their ability to tell stories about daily life in the area across centuries. In the wake of the losses, Richard contemplates the futures of collections in digitized records and photographs, and 3-D printed copies of objects. (Source: Blue Lab)
© 2024 Jayme Collins and Blue Lab. All rights reserved.