Anonymus Material

The Anatomy of the Permanent Marker

This project examines permanence as both a material condition and an institutional strategy, focusing on archival ink as a tool of preservation and an instrument of control. Designed to resist time, weathering, and erasure, permanent ink stages durability as stability, while its oil-based residues remain entangled with industrial infrastructures and fossil-fuel refinement. Marking is never neutral: it asserts authorship, fixes classification, and binds objects to regimes of value.

This research stems from an earlier case study of museum inventory numbers inscribed on culturally embedded objects such as jewellery, pottery, textiles, and glass. These bureaucratic traces impose modern classificatory systems onto artifacts, transforming cultural belongings into stratified sites of authority. A hypothetical “peeling, removing” practice exposes preservation’s paradox by triggering dialogue about ownership, colonial practices, and the ways in which cultural objects are expanded through drastic interventions.

Within Anonymous Material, dry compressed ink, the residue of removed markings, becomes a hypothetical object and a trace of institutional memory. Shifting between macro and micro perspectives, the work exposes how histories are governed through the quality of permanence.