Contribution to Tubelight Magazine #132

In issue #132 of Tubelight Magazine, the editors invited artists and writers to reflect on mourning and temporariness: the end of creative partnerships, the dissolution of cultural spaces, and the quiet afterlife of long-term projects. What grows when certainty dies?

My contribution to the issue responds to this question not through memory or ritual alone, but through administration, through the language that arrives when making ends. When artistic processes conclude, imagination often gives way to accounting, and collaboration is translated into receipts, invoices, and reimbursements.

This text was published exclusively in the printed edition of Tubelight #132, alongside contributions by Lot Groenendijk, Rita Ouédraogo, Roy Voragen, Gabrielle Gordeau, Julia Fidder & Rika Fujii, Sympoietic Society, Christine Bax, Anja Lok, Jaelen Chamberlain, and Pam Virada. I am sharing it here to extend its life beyond the page and to situate it within my ongoing research into archival melancholia, material residue, and the bureaucratic afterlives of artistic work.

My thanks to the editors and team of Tubelight Magazine for the invitation and for shaping Issue #132 with such care.

The administrative translation of loss Oftentimes, the end of an artistic project feels like a collapse. A slow unravelling, the moment when production ceases, the last email is sent, the rented lights are returned. The work continues to exist elsewhere, but I remain here, surrounded by its residue. Not the annotated scripts and storyboards, but the receipts and invoices: small slips of evidence, insisting on closure through accounting. They define the end not by completion, but by reimbursement.

For me, the end begins when the imaginative language of making is replaced by the administrative one of documentation. What was once a rehearsal becomes a purchase; what was once conversation becomes expenditure. In this hidden language of accounting, mourning becomes a process of translation. It is shared only between the artist and the accountant, at once intimate and bureaucratic. Receipts and invoices flatten the contours of making into tidy categories, transforming objectfulness into objectlessness. In this translation, I feel what Derrida might call the archive’s melancholia: to preserve is already to lose.

The invoices themselves hold a strange intimacy. They are the afterimages of collaboration, the material record of dinners, borrowed tools, and rented rooms. Their neat columns flatten the elasticity of process into the certainty of cost. Yet they also whisper, if you listen closely. Like haunted documents², they carry traces of what cannot be fully archived. They perform grief in their repetition, each invoice another small cry of “it is over.²"

Every conclusion generates two simultaneous archives: one of memory and affect, and one of financial evidence. The friction between them honours what disappears while acknowledging the strange, coded forms in which it survives. I try to find solace in this transmutation by acknowledging the beauty of translation itself.

The end, I realise, is not a point but a process. It is where the work begins to disappear and reappear, recoded in paper, numbers, and memory. And in that act of disappearance, love still lingers - faint as thermal ink, but warm to the touch.

1 Walid Raad, Atlas Group

2 Zina Saro-Wiwa, Mourning Class More information about the issue