Commission Your Archive
An invitation to sit with a scholar or curator, in the work of preserving a life
SIT FOR THE RECORD
A guided inquiry into the life you have lived, conducted with a scholar and a sound producer, recorded to studio fidelity and preserved in your own voice.
OR
CURATE YOUR TROVE
A sustained engagement with a curator, across the photographs, letters, documents, recordings, and objects a life has gathered, digitized and preserved to archival standards.
WHY YOU ARE READY
You are somewhere in the second half of a life that has asked a great deal of you and given a great deal back. You have thought about what to do with what you have gathered. You have wondered whether the voice in your head, the one that remembers, the one that still has things to say, should be recorded somewhere more durable than memory. You have opened a closet or a drawer or a hard drive and felt the weight of material no one else in your family will know how to read.
Sondage exists for this moment. You are in the right place.
WHAT YOU WILL GET
You will learn more than you ever knew about the life you have lived, or the inheritance you have carried. You will think carefully, and in good company, with a scholar or a curator who has prepared for you specifically. You will find language for what you had not yet put into words. What remains afterward is a sovereign archive, tangible and sophisticated, built to outlast the platform that made it, useful to you and to those who come after for as long as it exists.
WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH IT
Your archive is yours. What you make of it, now or across the decades ahead, is literally not in our business model. Some commissions are kept quietly. Others are shared with those you love. Some are deposited with institutions that matter to you. Some become the ground for further work, a book, a documentary, a project only you can yet imagine. A well-made archive continues to be useful to the person who made it, and to the generations who inherit it.
HOW TO BEGIN
We are people who want to talk. When you are ready, a short message is enough, and the first conversation will be unhurried.
The work is not in a rush. Neither are we.