at home they sat on the bench for a couple of days. this morning the painters came at 6.50am, and i decided to use the hours of the day that i’d found to start my cumquat marmalade making project.

i sat and chopped 800g of miniature oranges (although, as the women’s weekly fruit and vegetable book says here, they are “not a true citrus fruit”).

as i sliced the cumquats and removed the seeds (putting them in a separate bowl) i had a lot of time to think.

endurance

i’m struggling with my study at the moment. i can’t read the volumes of pages i really want, and need to read. i sit, start, and then get distracted. i have extremely low endurance for most things at the moment, reading and writing included. i tire or bore easily, even when it’s really exciting stuff th read. so as i sat and started slicing, i realised this was going to take me a while; i had to do it otherwise the marmalade wouldn’t get made, and the cumquats would go to waste.

(watch the video here if it doesn’t work)

so i persevered. got distracted here and there, but endured the slicing to the end. and now there’s a big bowl of sliced cumquats and 6 cups of water sitting on the bench, alongside a smaller bowl of cumquat seeds in a cup of water.

preservation

maybe you know about my phd project, maybe you don’t. in a nutshell though, i spend a lot of my time at the moment thinking about archives, and the spaces outside of the traditional archival institutions that also make and collect memories. maybe it’s a bedroom, maybe it’s a diy infoshop. but to think about these spaces i also need to think about the traditional spaces, and what archiving is all about. i tried to even be an archivist for most of last year, but some of the issues i’m looking at now really got to me then. inspired the project even.

one thing that archivists and archives do is preserve. artefacts, objects, memory, history. and i sat there, slicing the cumquats and removing the seeds, realising that i was preserving. i was an archivist of sorts all over again. it all started to get a bit wanky here, but i really did have one of those moments where it all made sense, where the cumquat marmalade becomes a metaphor for the object in the archive. preserved. transformed. in a different form, but still a cumquat. out of context. in a container.

the seeds are removed, soaked in water, the water strained of the seeds and added to the sliced fruit as a setting agent. the pectin in the seeds has been soaked out and reused in a different form. like taking the staples out of  a zine before you place it in the plastic sleeve to go inside an archive box.

decay

if you don’t preserve something, it will decay, rot, go to waste, not be usable anymore. preserving fruit and vegetables mean their life can be extended and we get more out of them; out of the superfluous produce at certain times of the year. we preserve with good quality fruit, not damaged ones, and the fruit that makes the jam or marmalade that we like the taste of. in an archive, we preserve those things of quality, whether physical or historical quality. we extend their life, and find other uses for them. we make decisions about what to preserve (‘appraisal’) and they become the things that we find our history or memories in.