I wanted the object to arrive as discovery, not possession. A compass with a frozen needle suggests navigation that has been interrupted, a direction someone else was following that stopped here, in this room, before the water rose. The Khmer-Flemish fusion lets me play with bureaucratic archive culture meeting temple architecture, colonialism's paper trails meeting sacred mathematics. The brass-scale coat echoes the compass — both artifacts of measurement, orientation, knowing where you stand. She's dressed in the logic of the thing she's found. The flood makes the archive a tomb and a womb simultaneously; knowledge drowning and preserved. I'm establishing the compass now so it can transform — next time it might be whole, or ancient, or newly forged. But here, in the first image, it's broken. That felt necessary. The inherited thing arrives already wounded.