Evocative Objects
“We find it familiar to consider objects as useful or aesthetic, as necessities or vain indulgences. We are on less familiar ground when we consider objects as companions to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought. The notion of evocative objects brings together these two less familiar ideas, underscoring the inseparability of thought and feeling in our relationship to things. We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with.”
- Sherry Turkle
Turkle, Sherry. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. The MIT Press, 2011. (p.5)
Students enrolled in the "Ethics in Material Culture Research" course completed a 5-minute autobiographical film essay centred around objects as part of their course requirements. This assignment was inspired by Sherry Turkle's collection of autobiographical essays in Evocative Objects (2007), which prompted contributors to explore several emotional and intellectual connections that people have with everyday objects.
Hence, the video essays highlight the indivisibility of thought and feeling in our relationship with objects. They also explore the development of emotional attachments to objects and the ways in which these attachments can stimulate intellectual reflection. The emphasis was not only on the practical utility of each object as a tool but also on their roles as memory objects that trigger reminiscences, apparatuses used to generate fresh insights, companions in life experiences, and things to think with—catalysts for the imagination.