INDEX-SYSTEM began as an impossible desire. How to make tangible that most evocative element of the unrealised project: the ideas that sparked the work, in whatever form they had first taken?

Our every collection of journals, visual diaries, notebooks, mindmaps and ephemera is a library of libraries without a catalogue, without a point of entry, without a means of access. Working with our hands frees our thinking in ways unmatched by the digital, but handwriting and drawing remain stubbornly unsearchable, frustratingly out of reach.

Sketching out possibilities to create such a system became a practice within a practice, one that took years to craft. The index would have to take a changeable physical form – something I could touch, something I could work in my hands – but once determined, the system could never change, otherwise the work of indexing would yield nothing.

Today, INDEX-SYSTEM is both a work and a practice: an auto-archive, a critical reflection, a generator. What began as a desire to contain ideas has become a radically open work.

INDEX-SYSTEM has since been presented at Writing+Concepts (Melbourne), Performing… Writing (Wellington, NZ), Americans for the Arts (Chicago, USA), Grizedale Arts (Coniston, UK) and Fittja OPEN (Stockholm, Sweden). Exactly ten years ago this month, INDEX-SYSTEM was first exhibited at Mailbox Art Space.

>>> Read on at Blindside

A Library of Libraries featuring work by Esther Anatolitis is showing at Blindside 11-16 March 2026. Two sets of objects will be exhibited – INDEX-SYSTEM: The Work and INDEX-SYSTEM: The Practice – as well as a selection of cards from The Work. Esther will be performing The Practice on opening night: 6:00-8:00pm AEDT Thursday 12 March.