I go looking at these kinds of objects when I am feeling unmoored because they help center me in a continuum of time, without making me feel voiceless or aggregate or disposable. Especially now, dealing with the conditions under which we see so much of our work gathered and trained on as data, which is then used to argue for the inessential nature of our field, or that our work could continue unpeopled.

But the hedgehog gestures at, instead… specific hands that made it, specific streets in which it was played with. The toy-making still recognizable as a practice all these millennia later. Legible through a changed world. Important because of its specificity.

tchiiiiip tchiiip tchiiip