Read: lost and found & the poetics of fragility

This text unfolds from the conceptual framework of the exhibition lost and found — a number of poetic exercises on memory, accidentality, and care. The exhibition begins from a simple question: What happens when meaning slips away, when the something that once was forgotten, reappears through remembrance and attention? It gathers artistic and theoretical practices that treat distortion, forgetting, and re-interpretation not as failures but as imaginative forms — ways of reactivating what has been lost, of listening to what has been muted.  

Rather than seeking coherence, lost and found traces how memory survives through its ruptures: in the broken medium, the misplaced word, the sound that reappears without a source. These fragments become a vocabulary for thinking about loss as a condition of creation — and about care as an act of finding meaning in what no longer fits. This little essay has the same nature: it’s a number of fragments, combined with illustrations, which remain unexplained, but still enter the distorted space of a dialogue.

As a practice of careful attention, each part of the essay is dedicated to one of the artists from the program of lost and found. Each part – is something that their artwork, their approach and our friendship made me think about. Each part – is a letter to my friend, and a sign of my most sincere admiration and gratitude. Thank you – for talking, sharing, experimenting and searching together. Thank you for finding me.

In the shattered pieces of broken writing I try to trace my own steps on a map of poetics of fragility. Here are five locations, that I found on this map: each one is a space in-between.

I. fragments — beginnings

to ezekiel djeribi ó stíofáin, with the anticipation of listening to windharp installation to let the wind worm sing at different levels (or to let us listen to it), that puts a listener in a conversation with sounds, lost and found in the wind.

We live among fragments — of time, of language, of recollection. Everything around us is already charged with the residues of existence: nature, culture, history, debris, and words. These fragments are the raw material of memory, but also of forgetting. In their accumulation, they form not a coherent archive, but a field of echoes — shimmering with accidental meaning. What does it mean to encounter the world through what has been lost, broken, or displaced?

Henri Bergson writes in Matter and Memory that memory is “the prolongation of the past into the present” (Bergson, 1988, p. 171). Memory, therefore, is not retrieval but vibration — a resonance that survives its origin. This vibration is fragile, unstable, always at risk of distortion. Each recollection is already a reconstruction, a work of invention as much as of recovery. This vision, this responsibility of one’s towards the process of memory — at once tragic and tender — gives us a model of attention: a way of looking at brokenness not as failure, but as the condition of meaning itself.

To remember, then, is to live with ghosts - to let the past inhabit the present in fragile, changing forms, but can we care for what haunts us? Can we build an ethics around this fragility? Paul Ricoeur writes in Memory, History, Forgetting (2004) that remembrance always carries a responsibility: it demands that we discern between what must be remembered and what can be forgotten. Yet this distinction is never stable. Forgetting is not an erasure but a texture of memory itself, a kind of soft border where the unspoken gathers. Ricoeur calls this “the wound of memory” (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 68): a site of vulnerability that is also a source of imagination.

If we approach memory as wounded and fragmentary, perhaps we can begin to see loss not as a lack but as a method — a way of knowing. What would it mean to create from the damaged medium, to let distortion itself become form? What if forgetting is not failure, but a pause — a blank space where meaning might reappear in another shape?

II. logic — accident

to joe onestal, and to all the inspiring memories, that are hidden inside digital canvas “Onestalgo”, a space to play collectively with images and its contexts through form, composition and poetics of accidentality. 

If memory is a reconstruction of fragments, accidentality becomes its secret architecture. The world, in its chaotic distribution of traces and remainders, offers us no coherent design — only interruptions and misplaced signs. Yet meaning is born precisely there, in the unplanned. What if accident is not the failure of order but its poetic counterpart?

Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, reflects on how a photograph can stab the viewer with an unexpected detail — the punctum (Barthes, 1980, p. 27). This wound of vision is accidental, and in this way – always intrusive: it cannot be planned or predicted. It erupts into meaning through chance encounter. The punctum becomes a metaphor for all forms of foundness — a sudden recognition that bypasses interpretation and goes directly into affect. The accidental is not meaningless; it is what escapes control, and thus opens the possibility of a new connection.

John Cage talks about it in Silence (1961), where he proposes to listen to the world as a sound environment without imposing order or hierarchy. The accidental soundscape becomes a field of participation, where listening itself is a creative act. Meaning emerges not from unity but from relation: from how fragments collide and reconfigure. The semiotic landscape, then, resembles a collage more than a map. Each sign is a found object, carrying the residue of previous contexts.

What happens, then, when we encounter a found object whose purpose has been lost? It becomes a sign that resists closure. Semiotics teaches us that meaning is always produced in relation. But the found object suspends and opens this relation: it waits for a new connection, a new context. To “find” something is to witness its transformation — from use to symbol, from residue to potential.

The accidental, the found, the broken — these are not just aesthetic categories. They are ethical gestures. They invite us to look again, to care for what no longer serves. In the world of excess and speed, attention itself becomes a form of resistance. What if care begins not from mastery, but from bewilderment? What if meaning begins when control ends?

III. translation — displacement

to ksenia kwiecińska, as a celebration of the fact that in both of our mother languages the word for “house” and the word for “home” is the same. growing from this overlay, ksenia’s workshop “home again” explores the connection between uncatchable, displaced and irreplaceable feelings of home and different options of re-opening it again in material forms, associations and found objects.

If to remember is to reassemble fragments, then to translate is to inhabit that process consciously. Translation is both a metaphor and a method for working with what is lost — an act of finding again, but never completely. What survives translation is not identity but relation — the echo of one language in another, the persistence of something untranslatable.

Every act of translation carries a double motion: preservation and distortion. The translator is both caretaker and intruder, holding the text while inevitably altering it. This tension mirrors the work of memory itself. To recall is to translate the past into the language of the present, and in doing so, we change both. The loss that occurs in translation is not a failure; it is a necessary form of renewal. Meaning breathes by being displaced.

Yet this process is also painful. Cathy Caruth describes in Unclaimed Experience (1996) trauma as an “impossible witnessing” — an event that returns precisely because it was not fully experienced the first time (Caruth, 1996, p. 9). Trauma, like mistranslation, repeats in fragments. It cannot be integrated directly into narrative, only approached obliquely, through distortion. The damaged medium of remembrance — a trembling voice, a blurred photograph, a broken syntax — becomes the most faithful witness. The very form of disruption speaks where the content cannot.

What if the act of translation — linguistic, emotional, historical — could itself be a space of healing? We interpret after the fact, and in doing so, we re-create the event. The gap between experience and its narration is not an obstacle but the ground of meaning. The subject who speaks from this delay inhabits a fragile agency: not control over the past, but the ability to shape its echoes. 

To translate, then, is to engage with the incompleteness. In each mistranslation — each failed attempt to render something whole — there lies an opportunity to notice what exceeds us. What if we think of art not as a statement, but as an [impossible] attempt to translate, retell the unspeakable? What if to create is to mishear the world, and in mishearing, to find a truer resonance?

Meaning, like the self, becomes legible only in motion. Displacement is not exile; it is a mode of presence in flux. Between languages, between memories, between selves, we find a fragile continuity — not of substance, but of attention; not of form, but of relationship.

IV. memory — care

to egor fedosov, to the surprising beauty of colorful birds from his photo project “They Are Animals”, 
that tells the story of stray parrots in the netherlands and explores hidden mechanisms of exclusion as politics of lost and found.

Every act of remembering is also an act of positioning — a way of deciding what counts as history, and who gets to speak. Memory is not only personal; it is political. As Paul Ricoeur claims, “remembering is not merely the preservation of traces, but the interpretation of their meaning” (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 22). The archive, therefore, is never neutral. It organizes what can be seen, heard, and felt. What happens to those memories that do not fit the dominant narrative — those that remain fragmentary, marginal, or unverified?

To “find” in this context is to refuse erasure. It is to retrieve what official memory has discarded as noise. This way, a fragment becomes a site of resistance. The act of care — of attending to what seems insignificant — is a political gesture. It interrupts the economy of visibility that governs what is considered meaningful. In the politics of remembrance, care functions as a counter-logic to utility. The neoliberal order values what is productive, measurable, and efficient. Care, by contrast, lingers. It is slow, attentive, unprofitable. To care for the broken, the found, the forgotten, is to challenge the idea that value depends on function. It is to insist that meaning is not a commodity but a relation. 

In this sense, the poetics of “lost and found” is inseparable from the practice of careful and empathetic listening. How do we hold what has no clear place? The answer may lie not in explanation but in attention. As Ricoeur suggests, memory demands justice: not retribution, but recognition. To recognize the broken trace is to acknowledge the life it once carried — and to allow that life to continue in another form. To give it space to reveal its voice.

Care, then, is both an aesthetic and political act. It is the refusal to let disappearance be total. To attend to a found object, a displaced sound, or a fading word is to affirm that existence leaves marks — that nothing vanishes entirely. This affirmation does not deny loss; it works within it. In a world that privileges progress and speed, to stop and listen becomes a form of solidarity.

The found fragment becomes a quiet protest: against the logic of exclusion, against the forgetting that power demands. To care is to disobey — to hold space for what resists categorization. What if every act of finding were also an act of resistance? What if our attention to the accidental were, in itself, a form of political imagination?

V. attention — resistance

to maarten de schutter, and their film “my sweet child”, which made me realize once again that memory is one of the most important and fragile forms of love. 

To find is to resist disappearance. In the act of finding, the world is momentarily reordered — not by force, but by attention. A broken cup, a forgotten melody, a note written on the back of a receipt: each carries the possibility of re-entry into meaning. They become small proofs that life does not vanish without trace, that the world continues to speak through what has been left behind. Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas writes that “attention is the first form of love” (Levinas, 1998, p. 87). In this light, attention and memory becomes a form of care — not only as sentiment, but as ethics. To attend is to acknowledge the alterity of things: to see what stands before you as both familiar and unknowable, as something that resists your control. The politics of finding begins here, in this small act of regard.

Finding, then, is not recovery; it is relation. It implies a willingness to coexist with uncertainty, to accept that meaning is made through contact, not possession. As Jacques Derrida writes in Archive Fever, every archive is haunted by what it excludes — “an irreducible remainder, an absence at the heart of the trace” (Derrida, 1996, p. 91). To work with what is found is to work with that absence, to make it visible without claiming to fill it.

This refusal of closure opens an aesthetic of fragility. What would it mean to build a practice around the incomplete, the precarious, the damaged? What would art look like if it sought not to repair, but to accompany? The found object, in this sense, becomes a companion rather than a resource: it speaks back, it remembers for us, it holds what we cannot.

In this light, the exhibition becomes both an archive and experiment. It asks: what do we do with what no longer fits? How can care emerge from what has been discarded? The act of finding — whether of an object, a sound, or a fragment of language — is a way of refusing closure. It affirms that meaning is not given but made, again and again, through attention.

To attend is to stay close to fragility. Each lost and found thing carries the weight of what it once was and the potential of what it might become. Between loss and recovery, memory and imagination, I find a space to dwell — not to restore the past, but to inhabit and reclaim the form of its shadows.

Bibliography

• Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1980.
• Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 69–82. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
• Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
• Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.
• Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
• Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through.” In The Standard Edition, Vol. 12, translated by James Strachey, 145–156. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
• Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998.
• Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.