PURPOSE

Lex

Okay. So yeah, let's have a conversation about archives. Yeah, let's start with your question. How do you find yourself here in the world of archives? How did you get here and why?

Vita

I think it comes from being raised by collectors, and artists and myself always being a collector from a young age. At some point, I realized it's a lot to care for stuff and became interested in how to care for this abundance of stuff for history and information. I studied Art History in undergrad and did research and was attracted to those questions. 

Lex

Did you literally go from Art History like what made you decide that you were gonna go to school or were you already interested in archives before you went to school for it? 

Vita

When I moved back to the States from Berlin after college I got an archives internship at Pentagram, which is a graphic design firm. I was working with a FileMakerPro database to catalogue all the design collateral from the firm. I got into working with databases, with posters, logos and branding samples, and  publications handling the stuff and really enjoyed it. I transitioned to a gallery, and I ended up doing the same kind of thing in that setting. I was on the research team, and we did a lot of database management stuff. I was looking for jobs and the requirements for reference and noticed that most roles required an MLIS. So that's when I thought, I'm gonna do that.

Lex

And what was it about those jobs that you wanted to do?

Vita

I really wanted to work in a museum archive. Something that I like about archives is actually handling or negotiating the material. What do you like about archival work? 

Lex

What do I like about this stuff? It just feels it's just real to me. I don't know how to describe it, but it just feels like I don't know our lives are so much about stuff and this stuff tells so many stories about our lives and people and the things that they did and what was important to them, and especially the stuff that gets kept. I approach this field thinking about why this stuff has been kept for so long. Whether that was intentional or not or how intentional it was, it's like, yeah, this got kept for a long time because someone decided to keep choosing it for a long time. Yeah, yeah. I work with seeds. I think about all of the seeds that we have and all of the plants that we have now. It's because over 1000s of years, people have imagined how we want to keep seeds, we want to keep eating seeds. We want to keep cooking seeds. We want to keep whatever with this thing. So we're gonna keep these seeds every time and I think a lot about how that was a choice every time and it's like no accidents. And I think that applies to Yeah, to all the stuff. I experienced a lot of gratitude for the people that decided to keep things, living things like seeds, but also other things and lots of things are alive in different ways. But yeah, I just experienced a lot of gratitude for people who came before who decided to keep things. 

Vita

Yeah, that's beautiful. I relate to that. I think it's so important. I think why it's important that we're in this field making sure these things are valued and kept because so much of our history is lost… that's how I think about the museum. You work with so many people in a kind of community archives, that's such a personal, deep relationship to memory and the value of that. That's so important.