Following Walter Benjamin’s mandate that “every image of the past that is not reckognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievable,” Fellow Travelers attempts to allegorically retrieve the past. This type of allegorical retrieval arises out of the fear of a loss of legacy- allegory as rememberence. In rescuing and remembering the past, the project allegorical reinvents meaning -- a new story is told. The work does not mean to tell the historical ‘truth’ rather “it means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”(Benjamin) It is this sense of urgency and inherent loss that is indexed in this project. By miming the logic of the cultural history museum, the work plays with convention in order to unveil the ideological systems that construct how one is to read the work. The work sets out to interrogate and unveil the ideology that constructs the problematic binary systems: aesthetics/politics, self/other, present/ past, private/public, civilized/primitive. The work hopes to reside in the space between these polemics, where they rub up against each other, causing friction, causing both sides to be implicated in their unconscious construction. It is also in this space that one can come to understand their own relationship to these systems. The work sets out to interrogate the role the museum, the anthropologist, cultural appropriation, aesthetic and political ‘choices’and yet the work eventually ends up implicating my own impulse and desire to interrogate these things.