Picture it, Spring 2016. It’s my first time out of the United States, I’ve barely ever left my hometown, and I’m now 4,500 miles away in the middle of London. Getting lost in a city that seems to stretch in every direction, with centuries of history layered into its streets. I’m here with a small group of fellow students, and our itinerary focused entirely on one thing: museums. For a single week, we did a marathon tour of the city through its cultural landmarks — the Tate, the National Gallery, the British Museum — absorbing art and artifacts like sponges. Every day is an overload of images and stories, an education not just in art history but in how history itself is displayed, organized, and preserved. I’d never been in spaces so meticulously curated, where every object had a label, a provenance, and a reason for being there.
Then came the encounter that stayed with me long after I left London. One afternoon, wandering through the Tate Britain, I turned a corner and came face to face with Tracey Emin’s My Bed. The 1998 work features a mattress on a simple bed frame, accompanied by crumpled sheets, pillows, and a blanket that appear to have been slept in and unwashed. Scattered on the floor around the bed are intimate objects, such as worn underwear, empty vodka bottles, cigarette butts, slippers, condoms, and everyday detritus from Emin’s private life. I later learned that these items were used and arranged deliberately every time the work was displayed. What attracted me to the piece was the sense of rawness, as if the bed was lifted directly from her bedroom and placed in the gallery.
One of the most striking aspects of My Bed is Emin’s straightforward use of personal ephemera. Emin treats these discarded materials as evidence, creating a record of a specific moment rather than a staged scene. Her approach shows collecting as a form of self-portraiture. What would typically be thrown away becomes part of her story, preserving a moment in its raw state. The work demonstrates that archives don’t have to be neat or selective; they can be messy and emotionally charged. My Bed suggests that even the most ordinary objects can hold meaning if they are kept and given context, a lesson that has shaped how I see both archiving and art-making.
That encounter stayed with me. At the time, I didn’t have the language yet for archives, curation, or even my own collecting instincts, but My Bed planted a seed. It showed me that objects don’t have to be rare or pristine to carry meaning; they just have to be kept and witnessed. Years later, as I began working with artist archives and developing my own photographic practice, I realized I’d been chasing that same feeling — turning fragments of life into something lasting. Looking back, I realize that My Bed wasn’t just a piece of art I admired; it was permission. It gave me a framework to see the value in what others might dismiss as mundane or messy. To archive, and to create is more than an act of preservation — it’s a declaration that the smallest details of our lives hold weight. It’s a way of saying that no experience is too ordinary, no object too insignificant to carry meaning. In choosing to keep and frame these fragments, we resist erasure and affirm that every life, with all its mess and vulnerability, deserves to be remembered.
Marilia Fara
Reading your reflection from here in Italy feels especially resonant, as earlier this year Tracey Emin was celebrated with Sex and Solitude at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence (16 March – 20 July 2025), her first major institutional exhibition in the country. What you describe in My Bed — that intimate disorder of personal objects, fragments of daily life, traces both fragile and raw — found strong echoes in the works shown there. Rather than presenting something rarefied, they insisted on vulnerability, on memory as something messy and alive.
Your text captures the shift from being overwhelmed by meticulously curated institutions to recognizing the radical intimacy of Emin’s work. It shows how archives don’t need to be neat to carry meaning: their force often lies in what is ordinary, fragile, and contradictory. Just as My Bed transformed a disheveled bed into a narrative, Sex and Solitude revealed how the contradictions and shadows of a life can themselves become an exhibition.