This project IPSEITY, forms part of an ongoing investigation into the personal archive belonging to my grandmother. It started two years ago, as a study of her cabinet of memorabilia. This prompted further enquiry into the significance of the personal archive in relation to my own identity.

Ipseity, meaning individual identity in Latin, is a collection of images both of personal photographs, as well as reworked material from my grandmother’s original archive dating back to circa 1902. This collection is an amalgamation of my research into memory, postmemory, the family album and ultimately the connections we have to the past that shape who we are in the present.

Memory is a means of linking the past and present, and exploring the interrelationships within the family network.

Through a continuing dialogue with my grandmother, examining visual material, and reassembling this material in my own narrative, I have experienced aspects of her past. These secondhand fragments can also be interpreted as postmemory, and thus aspects of my own past, remembered.

Anthony Prothero, 2019