Haus-A-Rest

A Zine Made by Artists, for the Bold and Brilliant.
We’re here for the makers, the ones who turn the unnoticed into narrative, who spin raw life into jaw-dropping visuals and fearless words. This is a space for the daring, the different, and the deeply authentic.

Each month, we spotlight the unconventional, the unseen, the unfiltered, and the unforgettable. Think rebellious stories, fresh perspectives, and art that doesn’t ask for permission.

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Issue 65

Memorabilia

A Curated Collection of Work by Writers and Artists

Why Memorabilia Matters

The theme of memorabilia is deeply entangled with the history of art and literature. Artists and writers have long returned to memory, objects, and the fragments of personal or collective experience as sources of inspiration. Memorabilia exists in the overlap between the intimate and the public, the ephemeral and the permanent, the object and the story it carries.

From the Romantic poets, who invested landscapes and objects with personal memory, to Marcel Proust, whose In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) famously turns the taste of a madeleine into a meditation on involuntary memory, memorabilia has always been fertile ground for creative reflection.

In the 20th century, artists began to consciously use memorabilia in their work, both personal and cultural. Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes (1930s–70s) assembled found objects, fragments, and keepsakes into poetic collections of memory. Christian Boltanski used photographs and everyday objects to evoke personal and collective remembrance, particularly around themes of loss, absence, and history. Tracey Emin transformed her own possessions into confessional installations, such as My Bed (1998), where memorabilia became a raw, autobiographical archive.

Writers, too, have turned memorabilia into narrative: WG Sebald’s hybrid works like Austerlitz (2001) weave photographs, documents, and prose into a tapestry of memory and history. Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida (1980), treated photographs as souvenirs of intimacy and loss. Teju Cole, more recently, writes with a similar sensibility, treating images and fragments as mnemonic triggers.

In the digital era, memorabilia takes on new forms: screenshots, saved messages, social media feeds. Artists such as Sophie Calle have explored the boundary between memory, evidence, and intimacy through collections of text and images. Meanwhile, contemporary internet-based artists often work with digital debris as a form of modern memorabilia, reframing the things we save, screenshot, or archive in the cloud.

To engage with memorabilia as a theme is to engage with the very act of keeping, archiving, recontextualizing, and storytelling. It’s about asking: What do we hold onto, and why? And for artists, how does that act of holding become a gesture of making?

Memorabilia are not only objects, concert tickets, photographs, letters, keepsakes, but also fragments of memory, gestures, words, and feelings that we cling to, reimagine, or transform. For artists and creative thinkers, memorabilia often becomes raw material: the ephemera that bridges past and present, personal and collective history, lived experience and artistic practice.

In times of constant digital turnover, memorabilia challenges us to think about what we hold onto, what we archive, and how we reframe personal or cultural histories through creative practice. From nostalgia to critical reflection, from intimate souvenirs to ironic collectibles, this theme opens a wide space for interpretation.

We invite artists and writers to send us works that explore memorabilia in any sense, whether material, emotional, digital, or imagined.  

FOR THE GALLERY AND HERE FOR THE WRITER’S CORNER, AND BLOG News

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*News is now on the blog*

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This month’s feature is Artist

Jill Laudet

This issue’s resident creatives include our Graphic novel bookworm Mildred Burchette-Vass, critical art writer Michaela Hall, our wordsmith poet Peter Devonald, and our editors and creators Nichola and Jenna

!! Calling Artists & Writers!!

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The next open call for Issue 66 is Themed

Accumulation

 HAUS-A-REST is now accepting submissions for our next issue of the online zine and our Instagram gallery. We welcome work in any form—visual art, photography, digital media, collage, painting, sound pieces, video stills, poetry, essays, fragments of text, short fiction, experimental writing, and beyond.

For this open call, we are seeking art and writing that explores this theme links below.

 Follow this link to enter our next free call out …

Feel free to get in touch via the form below with your Ideas & Questions.