Alessandra Violi

BOXES

After you died, your photographs and other bits of your past life — pictures of your dad and mum, your mother's will written by hand on a skin-like piece of paper, scraps of an old advert for Siderexport showing dad smiling among his colleagues, a hair clip made to look like an improbable flower — all ended up in a box.

It's funny how we all become curators when dealing with the belongings of our ghosts, literally taking care of their objects by enclosing them in a case or a casket, the box as a safe that is meant to preserve what is precious, the unnumbered lots of our private archive. Come to think of it, though, this boxing is as mortifying as storing items in those filing cartons used for public archiving: the box can be a coffin from which no retrieval is expected; lifeless things may lie there in waiting, but their concealment is, in fact, an intimation of their disappearance, of their social and affective death.

I now realize that this is probably why I treated your coffin as if it were a box of a different kind. One of those Cornellian boxes full of toy-like objects and flotsam, faded photographs, marbles, pins, grains of sand and other trivia, all gathered there to perform some secret task. Joseph Cornell imagined them as the homes of ballerinas, opera singers and movie actresses, female performers who would replay the contents of his boxes in endless combinations through their bodies: dancing, acting, fading like the human voice; a deathly box turned into a living stage and a theatre-box for us, the absent witnesses of their performances. I have often written about Cornell's boxes in my academic work, understanding (through the lens of Walter Benjamin) that his queer cases full of ticky-tacky were themselves archives of another sort — the box creating a third, intermediate space where material things stopped being dead relics of the world outside or tokens of the affective world inside, but rather cross-indexed each other to perform new constellations and surprising conversations. An entry in Cornell's diary thus wondered what the objects randomly integrated in his boxes "would have to say to each other," reinventing the box as an archive of virtualities, a Pandora's box generating potentialities.

As your box had to be closed and sealed off, what I had studied for my job percolated through my nerves and became simply an affective impulse acted out by the body (my gesture was indeed secretive, as if unconsciously aware of transgressing some conventional — if not sacred — function of the wooden coffer): I slipped, next to your unresponsive face, a senseless piece of ribbon and an old photo of you and dad, one of those tacky holiday souvenirs where the sun shines so shamelessly that the light looks unreal. Admirers of Joseph Cornell claim that his boxes are best appreciated by putting them on the floor and lying next to them. His boxes invite you to play dead — Cornell got his idea of boxing things from Houdini, the famous escape artist who could flee the encasement of death — or to stop being straight and be nothing but an affected body, whether in rest or sleep, intimacy or disease — Cornell got his idea of boxing things from the miniature toys he made for his brother Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy. Perhaps my nesting of an archive within another was an exchange of gifts, as I can't really tell now whether the box was meant for you, filling it with things you could replay with while lying, or for me, staging your death in my memory as a theatre of endless performances and affective animations.

Then other boxes came. Those into which I had to pack all my belongings for moving out, choosing to go back to the house where I had grown up and where you had lived until the end. Against the advice of some of my friends not to take residence in a mausoleum, afraid that I would turn myself into a document of our shared past, I felt that "home" could be re-enacted differently, its repository of gestures and rituals fleshed out as new events. The living box of the body against dead repetition in the "little box" of our house.

* * *

"Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky. Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same. There's a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one. And they're all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same."

* * *

Around the year that I was born, Malvina Reynolds sang about people being serialized in "little boxes," homes and workplaces packaging life stories into the same imitation game. So, the word "ticky-tacky," which she invented for the purpose, is about my age, an item of a musical archive that I can now play differently. You can't imagine the amount of ticky-tacky I had to sort out while moving here, boxing in and boxing out heaps of trivia and memorabilia, fingering each of them: grandmother's old-fashioned lace gloves, stray pieces of cloth ("what the hell …?"), a diary from the time of World War II by a grandfather I never knew, buttons, my first sketchbook that you had religiously kept in a drawer. My archive, your archive, and at each turn around the home-box that my body knew by heart a strange feeling of deja-vu, but made new, enacting a different story. The making of an archive is in the pulse between keep and throw, but Cornell gave me a knack for the discarded: ping-pong balls, hair pins, feathers … he stored them away in 57 cartons that now make up the artist's archive at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He never meant them as collectibles, though. The point was to give them new homes, out of the archive-box into his art boxes, what he called "toys" for affective games with the past, recounting a history that never was except in the imagination of the player.

That's how I have learnt that boxes are not for storing the belongings of ghosts, but for ghosting time: like your old hatbox that now contains your archive, my affective processes are neither of the past nor of the present. They hover out of (the archive's) order, inhabiting a space of transition just like this letter, left in this post-box...