and you'll pass it on, won't you?

2023

research essay

Graphic Design by Catherine Hu printed, emossed & bound at Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam 2023

"In the course of her essay, 'And You'll Pass It On, Won't You?', Ada leads the reader carefully and artfully through a series of entanglements with the concept of inheritance. Ada draws on both her personal history (to explore how inheritance operates within the context of family relationships, including at the level of the object — in this case, a small item of heirloom jewellery) and collective, political history (following and interpreting the fate of a massive statue of Lenin handed down to the residents of post-Cold War Berlin). Ada bridges the gaps in scale, intimacy, time and space between these two core examples by metaphorically presenting both as instances of games being played. This notion provokes author and reader alike to consider their own role(s) and goal(s) in relation to our inherited status quo, which, rather than offering the possibility of any final victory or defeat, seems to instead demand only ongoing renegotiation. How can we find space for new or individual expression amid all that we inherit — culturally, linguistically, materially — as we enter and move through the world? In attempting to answer this question, Ada turns ultimately to the voice, the play of sound, as a possible site of agency."

-Will Pollard, June 2023

"[...]The three highlighted theses include 'And You'll Pass It On, Won't You?' by Ada Jochimsen (Jewellery-Linking Bodies) which focuses on notions of inheritance with the embodied voice providing a sense of agency. From the loss of a stone belonging to a family heirloom, to the removal of Lenin's statue in post-Cold War Berlin, it explores the entanglements of personal and collective histories. Anachronistic in kind, it questions the legitimacy of engaging with hand-me-downs and the particular responsibility bestowed upon the individual inheriting historical events embodied by jewels, statues and monuments. It does so by relying an a conscious choice of the form of content, such as hypertext and overlapping graphics and imagetics, alongside an economy of referencing strictly relevant to the line of thought at hand[...]"

-Excerpt from the Rietveld Reviewed Report 2023