The curator who found me through a 15-year-old PDF nobody else bothered to delete
Back in 2009 I had a show in a small gallery in Brno that no longer exists. The gallery put up a basic website with installation shots. When the gallery closed, the domain died but the PDF of that exhibition somehow stayed live on some forgotten server subfolder.
Last year a curator from Oslo emailed me. Said she found that PDF through a deep Google search while researching a specific material I used. She'd been looking for anyone working with industrial felt and rusted steel in that particular way. The PDF was the only document online that showed it.
She booked a studio visit. I got two museum shows out of it. Norway, of all places.
Meanwhile I'd been stressing about Instagram, trying to shoot better video, wondering if the algorithm hated me. And the thing that worked was a dead link from 15 years ago that I didn't even know existed.
I don't know what the lesson is. Leave things online and don't delete them, I suppose. The internet forgets slower than we think. Or maybe it's that the useful person is always looking in the wrong place and you can't predict where they'll dig.
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This is such a wild and wonderful thing. That a dead gallery's forgotten server folder still had your work out there somewhere, waiting for the right person to find it. Almost like the internet worked the way we all hoped it would back then, for once.
I think about this with old work sometimes, things I posted years ago on platforms that barely exist anymore. Hard to imagine something surviving that long and actually leading somewhere. Really happy for you that it did.
Ah that's the thing alright. I've a similar story but the other way round, I found a printmaker in Donegal because she'd put a single image on some university portfolio site back in 2005 and never took it down. The rest of her web presence was gone, Instagram deleted, old blog dormant, but that one student page just sat there like a stone in a field.
I emailed her half expecting never to hear back and she replied inside an hour. Said she'd forgotten that page even existed. We ended up trading prints for years after that.
There's something in it, isn't there. The stuff we polish and push gets lost in the noise. The thing we forgot about entirely just sits there quiet and patient and somebody finds it exactly when they need to. Makes you wonder what else is still out there waiting. Some wee ghost of a page you made at 2am and never thought about again. Sure maybe that's where the real connections live.
That's it exactly. The stuff we forget about does the work. I love that you traded prints, that's the real economy, the one that happens sideways.
The curator told me later she almost didn't click the PDF because the filename was just "exhibition_text.pdf" and she expected a wall label, not images. Tiny margin, the whole thing.
That's the thing, isn't it. We built all this infrastructure for permanence and it's the forgotten bits that actually last. The stuff nobody remembered to delete.
I think about it the other way too, all the things I carefully archived that are gone because some platform pivoted or some server got wiped. The junk that survives has a kind of stubborn luck to it.
Hope you find something of yours still floating out there somewhere. You never know.