Matla and Archive Shredder Dust Fractals

While shredding decades of paperwork I come across many notes, invoices, letters and receipts. Some of them make me remember vividly happy and hard times. A few documents I save a few more minutes to look at once again before shredding these as well and letting go of the times they belonged to.

One little membership card made me look up its history:

The owner of such a card could call a number to have specialists retrieve information out of a trove of millions of newspaper clippings, publications and microfilm from a magnificent archive founded by Jean Hubert Matla (1902-1968) and maintained by a staff of editors when he passed away.

Jean Hubert Matla

Pelle Matla published a bief history of the organization online. It was the earliest Dutch press agency.

In the 1990's computers and Google became more dominant sources to look up information but even in 2011 the Media Info Groep acquired the immense archive and set about to scan and intelligently index the 6 million articles, only to discover, along the way, that times were changing faster than they could keep up with scanning. In 2014 the collection, including metal cabinets full of microfilms and microfilm reading devices, was last seen waiting to be picked up for destructon.

As I fill and replace bag after bag of shredded documents, I notice that fine paper dust, statically charged from the metal shredding teeth, creeps in between the plastic bags and the container, settling against its wall in fractal-like patterns.

The paper dust 'grows' around stress points where the container plastic has been molded and where holes have been made for metal bolts.

As decades of my life's papers vanish, they build a delicate lacework of paper ferns.

Update 8 nov 2019: