ESSAY & OPEN CALL FOR COLLECTIVE WORK
August 3, 2026
Chrysalis, published in July, began from this premise—one body caught mid-transformation, held together by collage. But a single body can only tell you so much about becoming. This month, Yellow Archive opens that process outward.
Metamorphosis has long offered a way of imagining bodies as unfinished. In Ovid, figures pass into trees, rivers, birds, stars; transformation is not exceptional but constitutive—identity is porous, and forms migrate into one another. Biology tells a related story with less metaphor and more strangeness: inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar does not simply unfold into a butterfly. Much of its body dissolves. Certain clusters of cells—the imaginal discs—survive that dissolution and reorganize into something new. The butterfly is not hidden inside the caterpillar, waiting. It is built from what remains.
This fascination with recombination has also shaped how images get made and shared. Cabinets of curiosity arranged coral beside fossil beside mechanical automaton, letting knowledge arise from unlikely proximity rather than fixed categories. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century harlequinades—metamorphosis books, printed with independently flappable sections—let a reader reassemble the page into new hybrid figures with every turn. The reader became a kind of co-author; the book stopped being linear. The Surrealists later gave this logic a name, the cadavre exquis: several hands compose one body, each blind to what came before, none able to foresee the whole.
What these histories share is a simple intuition: meaning doesn't always precede assembly. Sometimes it comes from it.
Individually, these fragments stay incomplete. Assembled, they become the anniversary issue: one year of Yellow Archive, marked not by a retrospective but by what the feminist theorist Donna Haraway calls sympoiesis—a "making-with," a body none of us could have made alone.
An archive doesn't only preserve what already exists. Sometimes it creates the conditions for something to arrive.
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