Abstract
Autobiographical narratives can embed in ‘things’, and the way objects degrade can be used as a way to conceptualise an understanding of the role of memory in storytelling. This piece is an auto-ethnographic essay that hinges around a series of blank art postcards collected by my mother in the early 1980s. These objects provide a way of engaging with the mechanisms of memory through considering the various narratives attached to them, and as material manifestations of the ways we record, remember and forget experiences. This is explored through considering the postcards as a reproduction of the original artworks they depict, as a souvenir of a particular experience, and also as physical objects in their own right. It draws on Walter Benjamin’s writings on materiality and storytelling, Susan Stewart’s writings on nostalgia and the souvenir, as well as anthropological and art historical understandings of materials and their processes of degradation
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