Welcome to Objectively
Welcome to Objectively! Before the first feature goes out, I thought I should share a few words.
Starting Objectively
To be honest, when I conceptualised this project one afternoon at Pophams Bakery, it wasn’t well thought-out. (Some may say this is what made it possible.) It was another of those impulses to start an editorial project that would allow me to ask questions to satiate my curiosity about people, and pass on these interesting stories widely.
In thinking about the format it will take on, I kept coming back to two questions I enjoyed asking friends, "what object would you want to be, if you could be anything?” and “what object would personify you?” I drafted a plan to kick it off, and within an hour, I was getting “yeses” to participate.
It was only weeks after when I haphazardly came across a paper I wrote when reading Anthropology, Coping Through Consumption: The Significance of Wearables, that it all made sense.
Some things I wrote,
Objects are important mediums through which we feel and enact a performative selfhood.
Objects help us to navigate our social world, injecting meaning and helping us to understand social processes.
They can evoke memories and forgotten histories, and are undoubtedly entangled in a person’s life and sense of personhood.
Fundamentally, I think that the act of consumption is not superficial. That even if in quotidian fashion it seems to be, it ties us to complex social, cultural, and political conditions. Therefore, by exploring our choices through the objects we desire, shun, and live through, we reveal who we are in relation to systems and societies.
About Objectively
There are many ways in which we interact with objects—we acquire, touch, hoard, display, inherit, hide them. Clothing we eagerly score in raffles or scour markets for; tools we rely on on the daily but don’t give much thought to; memorabilia we stubbornly lug from home to home, only to conceal them until our next move.
What are we choosing to remember? What do our consumption habits say about us? What are we trying to communicate? How do we find ourselves through the objects we choose? What roles do material artefacts play in helping us live? How do personal rituals and social symbols come into all of these?
This project is a small-scale series to explore the above questions.
Objectively is a series about people, the objects that hold meaning for them, and the stories they tell.
Leading with curiosity, the project is interested in objects as extension and embodiment of selves. We want to give space for people to reconsider their relationships with things, maybe acquiring new understandings of themselves in the process.
Here’s one final essay excerpt to send you off, Consumption is in some way involved in positive imagined futures, which are manifested in the ways we consume. As we will see, enduring scripts of relationships may exert a direct influence on this imagination.
Thank you for being here and I hope you enjoy what you see.