“I’m Not Sure Which Is Worse: Intense Feeling, Or The Absence Of It.”

Freud said that we endlessly repeat past hurts, forever re-enacting the same patterns in a futile attempt to patch the un-healable wound. This, more than anything, is the terror of the personal, digital archive: not that it reveals some awful act from the past, some old self that no longer stands for us, but that it reminds us that who we are is in fact a repetition, a cycle, a circular relation of multiple selves to multiple injuries. It’s the self as a bundle of trauma, forever acting out the same tropes in the hopes that we might one day change.

Navneet Alang, "Terror of the Archive"

Mountain Scene (1599) by Paul Bril

Arches National Park, Utah photo: Elliot McGucken

Claude Paradin, Devises Heroïques, 1567

Champion of the Sun.

Cauldron of the Sorceress (1879) by Odilon Redon

Epitaphios of Michael Kyprianos. Early fourteenth century. Princeton University Art Museum.

Hockenheim, 2019