re-imagining souvenirs

During the month of the fellowship, I researched the idea of the souvenir and its relationship to the handmade and craft industries. Souvenirs, as objects, act as tangible markers of particular experiences or places. In On Longing, Susan Stewart describes the souvenir as an object that marks not the lived experience of the maker, but the “secondhand” experience of its possessor. In this way, the experience of the souvenir object lies outside the body, it is completely detached from the material and embodied processes of making.

Souvenirs often operate as narrative abstractions: as “things” that make an experience or location that is not for sale, sellable. The labour of the maker is obscured, and these objects are appropriated from their cultural contexts, entering the sphere of private domestic space as evocations of past experiences.

As a craftsperson, I wanted to explore whether it might be possible to make a different kind of souvenir. A souvenir where the body’s experience of place is foundational, where the author is also the owner and one which resists the capitalist extraction and cultural imperialism so closely tied to tourism.

I began by using clay as a medium to register the surface textures of Venice, creating ink imprints from these clay impressions. By capturing traces of place, I sought to evoke the more tactile and textural qualities of a city so often reduced to its aesthetic image.

This process later extended into a participatory workshop at the UK & Kenya Pavilion in Venice. Participants engaged with the Pavilion and its surroundings through clay, using it to record and collect surface textures. These clay impressions were then inked and stamped onto paper, forming a shared collage of textural souvenirs. The resulting document functions as a record of an experience at the Pavilion.

The clay used during the workshop has since been recycled and transformed into a vessel, materialising the traces of collective touch, place, and experience into a re-imagined souvenir.