To Preserve, To Elevate, To Cancel
The contrasting, three-part set of meanings — To Preserve, To Elevate, To Cancel — of the German word, “Aufheben,” became the frame from which to consider my family’s twenty-year anniversary after having immigrated to the US in 1985. The impulse to preserve: whether to hold on to objects in the world which define an individual, or to take a photograph in order to record an experience or memory, necessarily places value on that entity over all others, elevating its status. This investment of energy on that particular table, or on this particular moment, for example, cancels its original status as being the same as all else.
