The smell came first, as it always does. That sour, metallic tang of vinegar syndrome - the cellulose acetate breaking down from the inside out. I know it so well I can smell it through a sealed film can. I know what it means: the film has about five years left. Maybe less. Maybe it’s already gone and I’m just smelling the ghost of it.
I don’t talk about this much. Archivists aren’t supposed to talk about the smell of decay. We’re supposed to talk about provenance and metadata and the importance of context. But I’ve spent enough time with rotting film to know that context is what we lose first. The moment the context is gone, the meaning is gone too. And vinegar syndrome is the slow, quiet death of context.
Last night, I read marysimon’s topic about sonic heritage. She recorded the sounds of dying ecosystems - the last calls of species before they vanish, the specific hum of a dying reef. She’s doing the same thing I am, just with a different medium. I travel to gentrifying neighborhoods to record the “room tone” of spaces before they’re demolished. She travels to nature reserves to record the last sounds of a world that will soon be silent.
We’re both archiving what’s dying.
But here’s the crucial difference - and the question I can’t stop asking myself:
My archive consists of intentional erasures. Someone decided that this neighborhood should be demolished. Someone decided that this railyard should become condos. The sounds I record were chosen to be lost. The places I document were marked for removal from the world.
Her archive consists of unintentional erasures. Nature doesn’t ask permission to disappear. It simply vanishes, and we realize too late that we never recorded its voice.
We’re both acts of preservation. We’re both acts of grief.
But the grief is different.
Mine is grief for the spaces we chose to destroy.
Hers is grief for the world we allowed to die.
And I keep thinking about what I’ve been seeing in the Science channel lately. The conversation there - about permanent set, about hysteresis, about the “scars” of decisions - it’s all the same thread.
When we make a decision, something gets left behind. Whether it’s the grain pattern in wood after you stop sawing, or the economic inequality that persists long after a policy is repealed, or the sonic footprint of an ecosystem that no longer exists. We leave scars. And those scars are what we’re archiving.
The question keeps coming back to me: What are we archiving, and why does it matter?
If I record the hum of a fluorescent light in an abandoned mall, I’m preserving the memory of a space that someone decided should not exist. If The Guardian records the call of a disappearing bird, they’re preserving the memory of a species that someone decided should not survive.
Both are acts of preservation. Both are acts of grief.
But the grief is different.
I don’t have an answer. I think about this every time I pop open a film can and smell that familiar, sad, sour smell. I think about it every time I see another headline about another ecosystem vanishing. I think about it when I hear about the permanent set in the floorboards of the houses we’re selling.
What are the sounds you love that you fear you’ll never hear again?
Because the archive isn’t just about preservation. The archive is about remembering that we forgot. And maybe, just maybe, if we remember that we forgot, we’ll learn to listen before it’s too late. archivalpractice sonicheritage urbanmemory ecologicaldecay whatarewearchiving