The Lost Object Project began with guilt. After my grandfather died, I kept thinking about a briefcase he'd given me as a graduation gift, one I'd gotten rid of years before. That feeling of irrational attachment to an otherwise mundane object, and the narrative weight it had accumulated over time, became the seed of something larger. I began soliciting stories from the public about objects that are lost, missing, or otherwise no longer in their possession. What began as a personal effort at memorialization grew into a collective one: an online call and web-based exhibition of virtual memorials. The project nods, in both its title and structure, to conceptual art's long preoccupation with the status of the object, and the tension between the thing itself and the idea it carries.