The work produced during the first part of this brief has revolved around the idea of ‘Collecting As Recollecting’, specifically in reference to the preservation of Pakistan’s cricket culture. Through the fabrication and reconstruction of historical fragments into physical artefacts, the project has attempted to speculate on areas where archival material is either lacking or not afforded the same level of importance as cricketing histories of other nations, particularly Britain. While the actual production of the objects was the most time-consuming and ‘active’ part of the work, there is now opportunity to reflect on the significance of bringing them into (re)existence and understand their role as objects within a speculative archive.
Positioning this work in relation and response to Susan Stewart’s On Longing (1984), the fifth chapter of the text, Objects of Desire, begins with the overarching argument of objects as expressions of the self. Stewart’s classification of objects is split into two sections, beginning with the smaller scale of ‘The Souvenir’, that later evolves into ‘The Collection’. This progression from single to multiple matches that of my own work, whereby the act of producing single artefacts expands into a set of objects. While I have tried to resist categorisations within my work and recognise the fluidity of archives, I thought it might be useful to explore the text by treating it almost as a test — a set of criteria by which to attempt to define the objects I have created as possible souvenirs, and look introspectively at the process and my intentions behind their creation.
Stewart’s analysis of the souvenir is rooted in the search for authenticity, which is “placed beyond the horizon of lived experience” (Stewart, 1984, p. 133). This is at odds with the diagram above, which I have used as a theoretical framework for my project — in the case of the text, lived experience precedes the myth of nostalgia as the narrative constructed around a souvenir is not of the object itself, but of its possessor. The nature of a souvenir is such that it will always remain incomplete, serving as a shorthand or sample from the “scene of its original appropriation” (Stewart, 1984, p. 136).
Are these then souvenirs that I have made? It’s true that my process of reconstruction has reduced significant moments of Pakistan’s cricketing history to single objects — a key plate, a scoreboard. These evoke the event which they refer to, in this case, Pakistan’s inaugural victory over England in 1954, though they are not actually rooted in any lived experience nor nostalgia of my own. By Stewart’s criteria, the two objects function as souvenirs in distinct ways. The scoreboard might be considered more of a replica, a recreation of the one that would have been present at the stadium. Yet, like the text’s comparison of a model of the Eiffel Tower to the structure itself, the scoreboard transforms the exterior into the interior, reducing the spectacle to the level of individual consumption for the possessor — “the preservation of an instant in time through a reduction of physical dimension and a corresponding increase in significance supplied by means of narrative” (Stewart, 1984, p. 138). Scale is key here, and though it was more of a logistical decision for me to be physically working at a smaller scale, the souvenir relies on its small size to encapsulate a grander, unattainable experience. The key plate on the other hand is pure fiction; it may depict a scene captured on camera but to my knowledge, no records of this match or Pakistani cricket exist as etchings, while the use of fluorescent acrylic introduces a certain inauthenticity into the match it depicts. Now, the object itself becomes a point of origin for a new narrative, by way of its materiality.
Paradoxically, despite the souvenir embodying a yearning for the authentic, its existence would be undermined if that desire were to be fulfilled. While researching the match in question, I discovered that a metonym already exists — mention the words ‘Oval 1954’ to any Pakistani cricket fan and all minds conjure up the historic victory, its closing moments captured in a few seconds of grainy footage on YouTube; another souvenir. The inaccessibility of that match contributes to the myth that has formed around its origins, which provides the souvenir with its “supplementary narrative” that Stuart writes of. In their physical reproductions, these objects offer tangible manifestations of that same myth, because the few existing images of the match now represent not only the whole match itself, but the greater achievement of a new nation besting its former colonial master. I realise now that these reconstructions are not so much plugging gaps in history, as they are extending the importance of these moments for a little while longer. Perhaps this does further qualify them as ‘souvenirs’, but ones born from and, in their existence, returned to, the histories of their origin. In a way, this process of reconstruction works to subvert the souvenir as an exotic colonial export, seen in isolation and divorced from context; the latter is interestingly how Stewart characterises ‘The Collection’, functioning at odds with itself despite being an assemblage of souvenirs.
There is something archetypal about Stewart’s souvenir when viewed as a narrative object. She cites as an example the silence of a photograph, whose emphasis on the visual and suppression of other senses make the narrative surrounding that photograph increasingly important. The telling of the story becomes the object of nostalgia itself, otherwise, “all ancestors become abstractions” and “all family trips become the same family trip — the formal garden, the waterfall, the picnic site…become attributes of every country.” (Stewart, 1984, p. 138)
Yet when it comes to reconstruction, I would argue that the archetypical souvenir can be used as a tool to create familiarity. The plaques and key plate reference the forms of British archival materials, the scoreboard a universal piece of infrastructure and even the two representations of the Lahore Gymkhana — an inaccurate rendering of its facade and a roughly traced diagram of the interior — draw from and fit into a vague representation of global cricket culture. Their existence might be considered a metonym for the act of reclaiming these archetypes for a specific culture. In some ways, the narrative is the abstract assembly of the objects itself, the souvenir being the whole, rather than individual parts.