Intra-Acting Assemblages: New Materialist Exploration of a Family Artifact and Belonging in Finnish Canadian Migration

1. Introduction

Migrants recognize themselves as participants in multiple national communities, as well as in a community that transcends the nation (Cohen 2011: 5). They engage in dual belonging, in which their origin and destination places have a simultaneous transnational presence in their lives (Levitt & Glick Schiller 2004). In this paper, both transnational simultaneity and connectivity (Byrne 2022) are emphasized because it explores transnational family trajectories of Eila and Aaro, the participants in the study, who experience dual belonging due to their migration trajectories.

Eila and Aaro immigrated to Canada because of an employment offer that Aaro received. The job provided prospects of economic security, so they settled and built their life on the new continent. At the time of the interview, they had lived in Canada for more than 50 years. Their ancestors were once refugees from Karelia, a Finnish territory that was lost to the Soviet Union in 1940 during the Second World War. These participants were once mobile, but the trajectories of all their family’s cross‑border mobilities were in the past. Their age is not crucial to the analysis, per se, but their long life trajectory is.

This new materialist and ethnographic study explores the relationship between transnational belonging and material culture and investigates the ways a single artifact—an inherited coffee creamer—represents transnational trajectories and belonging within one Finnish Canadian family across several generations. This study examines how older Finnish Canadian adults use discourse practices and meaningful artifacts to reflect on migration; belonging; and their experiences of heritage, space, and time.

Transmigrants’ daily lives depend on multiple interconnections across borders, and their identities are transnationally configured. Transnational belonging in this study refers to belonging that stretches across localities and spaces in historical times across generations. Transnational belonging occurs in what Byrne (2022: 33) described as the heritage corridor, meaning that the environment of migrants is ‘stretched between their origin and destination locales’ emerging from the agency of people in collectives who themselves are transnationally distributed. The ‘heritage corridor’ approach to migration represents an alternative to the heritage approach that, according to Byrne (2022: 109), deviates from the nation‑state frame in which heritage denotes merely something that is left behind. In this study, the term heritage (corridor) is associated with migration that has trajectories in the past but also significance in the present. The concept of migration assemblage—the social and material interactions that constitute migration as a process and set of practices (Rubinov 2014)—has also been applied in this study. We used the terms ‘transnational’ and migrant because the participants identify as ‘Finnish’ and occasionally also refer to themselves as ‘migrants.’

Abandoning your home normally means leaving behind most, if not even all, of your belongings. Migration is ‘grounded in objects’ (Basu & Coleman 2008: 323). In this study, we offer a new materialist approach to migration and belonging. New materialism rejects the traditional philosophical dualism between human and non‑human (Toohey 2018: 26). As Pennycook (2018: 129) wrote, the non‑human is seen as a meditation for human practices. For new materialists, ‘discourse and matter are mutually implicated in the unfolding emergence of the world’ (MacLure 2013: 659–660). According to Toohey (2018: 29), ‘[n]ew materialism sees people, discourses, practices[,] and things continually in relation, under construction and changing together, becoming different from what they were before.’ Through a historical lens, we investigate emergent co‑productive entanglements and show how one family artifact and humans are ‘mutually becoming’ (see Barad 2003, 2011; Toohey 2018). Mutually becoming means that subjects and objects become something together in the intra‑action; they are not ‘ready’ before they encounter each other. By applying a new materialist approach, we show that an artifact, a creamer—that is, an object—is part of someone’s story. We further emphasize that an artifact has a role in representation of belonging. We do this by conducting a new materialist analysis of an intra‑action, whereby family members; their artifact, life, and migration trajectories; the stories they tell; and the stories the artifact co‑tells are dynamically entangled and told together. We explored how a single artifact has acted, reacted, and enfolded the life history and migration trajectory of the family through different times and spaces.

We consider the relationship of the participants in the study as intra‑actions. Barad (2011: 451) adapted the term from interaction, explaining that, when two things are in interaction, they are seen as separate entities with individual characteristics, but if they are seen as what they are in relation to one another, they intra‑act and come into being through their entanglement (Barad 2011; Toohey 2018: 29). Discourse practices and environments are constantly changing and adapting through intra‑action. This relational ontology is the basis of the posthumanist account of the material participants. As Barad (2003: 814) wrote, this approach advocates for a causal relationship between practices embodied as material configurations of the world (i.e., discourse practices) and material phenomena (i.e., artifacts having active roles rather than being static objects).

Belonging is a concept that relies on processes of social identification because it ‘allows us to study the links between “the self” and “society” from the point of view of the person’ (May 2011: 368). Migrant trajectories, experiences, and patterns of belonging are commonly explored through life narratives (Georgakopoulou 2015). When exploring transnational belonging, memoirs and stories of migrant trajectories are traditionally the focus. Yet, when we concentrate only on what humans do, we ignore the fact that material things can also perform (Toohey 2018: 27). Not only are people, stories, trajectories, and artifacts entangled, but artifacts can also co‑narrate stories that facilitate belonging. Wang (2016) explains the ‘material turn’ in migration studies, emphasizing the growing significance of artifacts in them (see the object‑turn, Woodward 2001). This study presents a posthumanist and new materialist discourse on the role of a vintage creamer within a family emigration trajectory. Pennycook (2018: 6) describes posthumanism as a critical approach that questions the boundaries between ‘what is seen as inside and outside, where thought occurs, and what role a supposedly exterior world may play in thought and language.’ Posthumanism challenges traditional humanism by, for example, seeing the role of the material world in a different light and questioning the unique, central role of humans, suggesting we are deeply intertwined with the material world. From the posthumanist perspective of transnational belonging, we highlight the significance of the artifact and its intra‑action with the people involved differently and more profoundly than in existing scholarship.

2. Previous Research on Material Culture, Migration, and Belonging

Previous research on migration and material culture demonstrates that objects that are meaningful to migrants consist of either memorabilia or utility objects (e.g., Byrne 2022; Christou & Janta 2019; Parkin 1999; Povrzanovic Frykman & Humbracht 2013; Riikonen 2023). Earlier research describes the significance of artifacts for migrants: they can provide security, maintain family ties, and provide feelings of continuity and stability (Parkin 1999, Povrzanovic Frykman & Humbracht, 2013). Muhonen and Vaarala (2023) investigate how Finnish immigrants in Canada discuss an old Finnish school map and report how the map retells the nation’s history. Objects carry a performative repertoire of practices ‘imbued with affective connotations and shaped by the personal magnitude of things in the narratives of migrant lives’ (Christou & Janta 2019: 657). Woodward (2001) investigates preferences in domestic material culture through narratives regarding household objects. Objects occupy a position similar to that of space, time, and bodies; they are all foundational media through which social life is experienced (Woodward 2001).

Migrant objects have emotive capacities of consumption objects (Riggins 1994). Earlier research reports on assemblages being ‘relational spatialities’ that produce ‘unconscious arrangements of bodies, things[,] and ideas’ (Collins 2017). Material objects also function as support in adapting to, and feeling at home in, the new society and relate to homemaking (Christou & Janta 2019; Riikonen 2023; Rios & Watkins 2015; Rubinov 2014). Artifacts can strengthen memories and reinforce and reconstruct immigration identity (Mehta & Belk 1991; Muhonen & Vaarala 2023; Povrzanovic Frykman & Humbracht 2013; Riikonen 2023).

In previous studies, material artifacts were seen as nonhuman objects, following the dual understanding by which humans use them and keep them for material identity expression. In this paper, we introduce a new materialist lens to the study of migration and material culture. The novelty of our research is that artifacts are seen as mediators and participants in human practices and emigration narratives. We apply transnational intra‑action and the theory of assemblage, and we concentrated on exploring trajectories of belonging of one family and one artifact, because, according to the new materialist ontology in our study, these actors co‑emerge to express transnational belonging across generations, nations, national and state borders, spaces, historical events, and times. In contrast, earlier material studies are often ethnographic material culture studies grounded in one domestic or national setting, i.e., the migrant home, and concentrate on many artifacts (Boccagni 2014; Olesen 2010). These studies were often conducted among larger ethnic groups (e.g., Bonfanti 2020; Mehta & Belk 1991).

Previous studies also concentrate on what kinds of memories and meanings people assign to objects and on how objects carry memories and symbols of home and identity in the present‑day migrant home. In our study, artifacts co‑mediate meanings in assemblages. Our study goes beyond symbolizing culture or objects by reconceptualizing belonging as materially enacted and dynamically constituted human–material mediation. Research on migration and belonging that recognizes the entangled and material nature of humans, discourses, and artifacts is needed. Further, we conducted our study among Finns, a less‑studied migrant community. Modes of migrant transnationalism and belonging among older adult migrants also remain seriously understudied.

3. Research Questions, Data, and Methods

This paper focuses on an intra‑action in which a Finnish Canadian couple and one artifact, a creamer, are at the center of attention. The focus of our paper is on the information that is transferred in the intra‑action, which includes:

• What is the role of the creamer in the intra‑action?

• What stories of transnational family belonging, migration, time, and space are inspired by the intra‑action around the artifact?

We discuss how participants talk about the artifact and how the artifact co‑narrates with them—that is, how the artifact contributes to the stories of those for whom it is meaningful. The notion of assemblages considers ‘how things exist for each other[;] how the relations between things, semiotic resources, people, and space matter’ (Pennycook 2018: 129). An assemblage is a constellation of elements that come together to form an interlinked structure of meaning (Nail 2017). In this paper, our participants, the artifact, and the intra‑action are entangled in an assemblage, creating a transnational story of the family and their life trajectory. The advantage of the analytic frame of assemblages is that they allow for mobility to be analyzed even in the absence of movement because the imaginaries that are built around the materialities are equally important.

This study is based on two recorded in‑person interviews in Finnish; the first is an informal, unstructured interview co‑conducted with both researchers and where the participant talked freely about their life and migration trajectory, while, the second, a semi‑structured narrative and ethnographic interview, discussed material artifacts and included Muhonen (R) as a participant in the assemblage. The interview situations were relaxed and included laughter, mutual ground, and empathy. Using an interview as a research method allows for rich data to be collected. We carefully familiarized ourselves with the data, transcribed them, and translated selected excerpts into English. The new materialist approach alters what we traditionally consider a research interview to be because of the nature of entanglement between the participants: it changes the interview from being a tool for gathering verbal data into a complex, relational, and material assemblage. This reconfiguration invites researchers to attend to what the interview does, rather than just what is said. This intra‑action changes the relationship with the participant; it emerges in the assemblage, in the interview situation. The interview also creates intra‑action: the entanglement of material culture and the artifact adds three‑dimensionality and embodiments into the research practice (Barad 2007).

The interviews occurred in the private residence of the participants, around a coffee table. The study was approved by the Office of the Research Ethics (University of Toronto)¹ and adheres to all the required regulations regarding information, confidentiality, research consent, and the use of data. Participants were informed about what it means to participate and about the privacy practices in using (consented) audio recordings and photos as data. This study was conducted among older adults, and we were particularly careful and clear when informing them about the research, risks of confidentiality, and how the material is being used for research purposes. We reminded the participants regularly about research confidentiality, and they were invited to ask questions several times during the field work. Participation in this study was voluntary, and participants could opt out at any time. All identifiable information has been removed, Eila and Aaro are pseudonyms, and their identity key is known only by the researchers. The creamer, also a participant, was visibly displayed on the coffee table around which the interviews took place.

In addition, to being part of the intra‑action, our researcher positionality as Finnish‑speaking Finns who have lived outside Finland, and R’s long trajectory as an immigrant in Canada, offers us an insider perspective to the data and analysis, allowing good access to the data and to the exploration of the family narratives within the framework of Finland’s history. R is a member of the Finnish Canadian community, which further helps to build trust. We acknowledge that doing ethnography among one’s own can also bring challenges and bias as well as impact objectivity. We also represent academic institutions, and we acknowledge asymmetries of power as a result. Throughout the research practice and field work, we remain professional, and the discourse data—transcribed audio‑recorded interviews and photographs—allow reliable analysis and conclusions to be drawn.

We applied a new materialist discourse analytical method and looked at the interview data through a ‘window of discourse,’ which means investigating some larger patterns of cultural discourse practices in use (Blommaert 2005: 66). Posthumanist and new materialist approaches to discourse suggest we should rethink our relationship with our environments and the objects in them (Pennycook 2018: 1), because, in practice, ‘we live our everyday lives surrounded by, immersed in, matter’ (Coole & Frost 2010: 1). This approach guides us to think about why we are accustomed to thinking there are boundaries between humans and artifacts (Pennycook 2018: 6). It recognizes ‘the significance of materiality in social and cultural practices’ (MacLure 2013: 659). Such a lens directs our attention to material objects and their role and importance in discourse. As Lähdesmäki et al. (2014: 96) note, when studying trajectories of belonging, attention should be given to practices to allow a more nuanced analysis and understanding of the multiplicity of attachments to a range of material and immaterial objects. Research on small narratives recognizes ‘the pluralism, heterogeneity, and productive coexistence of narrative activities, big and small, in the same event, by the same teller’ (Georgakopoulou 2015: 256). Following a new materialist approach, we combined a detailed analysis of the intra‑action with ethnographic methods. We were able to tell a story of Eila and Aaro’s experience, exploring how certain practices connect to real conditions of their lives (Heller 2008: 250). This study of material culture is located at the intersection of research on migration, new materialism, transnational belonging, life narratives, and intra‑action.

4. An Artifact that Tells Our Story: An Analysis

We first reflect on the Finnish coffee‑drinking practice as a culturally meaningful social assemblage and a special heritage corridor, in which the creamer has a central role (4.1). Then, we discuss how the creamer functions as an identity kit in these assemblages (4.2). The analysis of the intra‑action introduces the creamer as a participant who sits, hears, initiates, and inspires discourse (4.3); focuses on the role of the creamer in the transgenerational and transnational family history and migration trajectory (4.4); and concentrates on the reflections on belonging the artifact prompts (4.5).

4.3 The creamer sits on coffee tables, hears, and inspires

Lawrence (1985: 129) writes that homes are the ‘warehouses of personal experience.’ Material aesthetic culture in people’s homes ‘offers opportunities for exploration of cultural, emotional, and aesthetic meanings that can be manifested in domestic objects’ (Woodward 2001: 117). The way the participants represent Finnish belonging is reflected in the artifacts they display in their home. The few objects they have kept across their life trajectory are meaningful. When R asked, ‘What else?,’ asking about what other things they brought with them, Eila immediately gestured to the creamer, that was on the table:

Aaro: This must be 100 years old.

Eila: I’m not sure. My mother and father got it as a wedding gift.

R: How beautiful. This is old.

Aaro: For sure.

R: It reads Arabia.

Kell (2015: 442) stated, ‘things make people happen’ and ‘objects, in and of themselves, have consequences.’ R picked up the creamer, felt it in her hands, and read ‘Arabia’ written on its base (Figure 1):

Figure 1

Arabia is both an iconic and historical Finnish glassware design brand and a name of a district where it was originally manufactured (Arabia 2023). Arabia refers to that place and time in history and to the symbolic cultural value that the creamer conveys through multimodal means. Eila’s reference to the creamer begins a long, meaningful intra‑action. When Aaro said ‘This must be 100 years old,’ Eila hesitated and said: ‘I’m not sure. My mother and father got it as a wedding gift.’ Eila’s parents received it to commemorate the beginning of their married life back in Finnish Karelia, and Eila does not know about its whereabouts before that. As the discussion unfolded, we analyzed the creamer as a biographical historical item that generates temporal and emotional references to participants’ belonging, providing a sense of generational continuity (Marschall 2019). As Riikonen (2023: 3) writes, ‘biographical items help in reaffirming the self in different phases of one’s migration trajectory.’

Toohey (2018: 28) notes that fixed and essential qualities cannot be attributed to human persons or non‑human things; rather, materials, people, objects, and discourses exist in relation to and with one another. Here, Finnishness is conveyed through the display of vintage Arabia porcelain and its trajectory in Finland, the creamer’s relation to the participants and their ancestors, and even in the ritual activity and assemblage of coffee drinking. The creamer assumes a more central role as the intra‑action continues:

R: Your parents received this as a wedding gift. When did they get married?

Eila: 1932.

R: Before the wars.

Eila: Yes.

Aaro: It has sat on many coffee tables.

R: It has, in Finland and then here in Canada.

Eila said her parents got married in 1932, to which R added, ‘Before the wars,’ which again refers to the lost Finnish Karelia. Eila’s parents got married there, which means that the creamer originates from there and has been used by generations of family members. Aaro comments on the role of the creamer and states, ‘If you could write down all the things that it has heard during coffee table chats, that would be a long history.’

Following new materialism, meaning‑making occurs in the intra‑actions in which participants and non‑humans are entangled (Toohey 2018: 168). In the present assemblage, the creamer intra‑acts and inspires the participants to think, reflect, and engage in a discourse of transnational family trajectory. Aaro emphasized that the inherited family creamer ‘sits’ in family gatherings, accompanies the human participants, and actively ‘hears’ the stories. Using the verb sit connotes the importance of mutual entanglement and the status of the creamer as a human‑like participant. By being a natural and important participant in coffee‑drinking rituals, the creamer is, and has been, a participant in countless family assemblages across generations, borders, and boundaries. As our analysis shows, it has been there, been used and touched, and has initiated discussions and memories. Aaro’s words imply that the creamer has also kept these stories, and he wishes ‘to write down all these stories’ to know them as well. According to Aaro, they are important and constitute ‘a long historical story’—a transgenerational and national narrative. R further noted that the creamer has been sitting on coffee tables in both Finland and Canada. The creamer’s presence in the current space and time and intra‑action connects the participants to different past locations and memories of them. The creamer has a longer history of being around coffee tables than the participants in the present assemblage, which was somewhat intriguing to Aaro. Through this nostalgic item, participants narrate their migration trajectories, maintaining memoryscapes (Basu & Coleman 2008).

Barad (2007: 136) writes that ‘post‑humanism doesn’t presume the separateness of any‑“thing.”’ The material world makes us recognize that humans participate ‘in a shared, vital materiality’ (Bennett 2010b: 14). This means that the creamer is a social participant in the intra‑action and the assemblage. It does not literally speak, but when Aaro notices it on the table, it prompts discussion, inspires the participants to interact with each other, and elicits their memories. It plays a role in the life narratives of their family trajectories. As in Burström’s (2014) study, the memories evoked by household utensils confer upon them a significance that far exceeds their practical utility. The creamer facilitates responses and memories of past and distant family members and is therefore more than just an artifact for Aaro and Eila.

5. The Creamer Crossing Spaces and Times

This new materialist study explored the multifaceted intra‑active role and mediation of an artifact—an inherited vintage creamer—during a social coffee‑drinking assemblage, a typical heritage corridor for the participants of this study. The intra‑action is a result of co‑participation and coexistence between a human and non‑human object—between the human participants (Eila and Aaro), R, and the artifact they have used and preserved. This study further investigated the stories the artifact inspires and participates in and how these stories are entangled in the sociohistorical past and present of the participants and their family members. The focus of this study was to explore how the creamer intra‑acted and inspired and how it enfolded the life and migration trajectories of the family.

A new materialistic approach observes artifacts in their surroundings. Materialities and mobilities offer an intriguing way of thinking about places and spaces (Brooks & Waters 2018: 2). Byrne (2022: 14) emphasized that studies of material migrant heritage should draw on whatever historical sources are available, including oral histories, in addition to surveying the material record. Transnational belonging in this study is explored through understandings of mobility, space, and time—all present in the current intra‑action around Eila and Aaro’s coffee table. Mobility is involved in the life of the creamer and its owners. The creamer has left its home several times: first with Eila’s parents in the Karelian exodus, then again when Eila decided to take it to Canada. In Canada, it has accompanied the family’s many relocations. The creamer has had a presence across all these trajectories and places, by hearing and participating in stories that involve many generations. Representations of transnational belonging are found across trajectories in these assemblages, in a direct and ongoing material engagement, through the practice of intra‑acting with the surroundings (Barad 2007: 379).

Both humans and the artifact are an essential part of the assemblage, and, as we have shown, also the meaning‑making in the story of Eila and Aaro’s transnational belonging. Skrbiš (2008: 233–234) stated that theorizing about how migration, emotions, and belonging are experienced and understood in the context of transnational family life involves several closely interconnected concepts, including the institution of the family, the processes of transnationalism and migration, emotions, and the complex question of belonging. Artifacts hold special importance for belonging. They are meaningful because they remind people of their experiences, places, and relatives and because the objects are symbols of identities. Here, the human participants are closely interwoven into the material world, and, in the intra‑action, a memorable and meaningful social coffee‑drinking assemblage creates the entangled narrative of a transnational immigrant family trajectory.

The intra‑action occurs in the present time and space, in a gathering around the coffee table in their retirement home. The creamer becomes a mediator of different understandings of time and space in Eila and Aaro’s transnational family and migration trajectory, allowing the participants to recall other historical periods. The participants see the role of the creamer differently when they refer to the various spaces, times, and trajectories of their lives. When Eila talks about the trajectories of the creamer, she simultaneously co‑reflects on the trajectories of her family. The creamer shapes the understanding of mobility as well as the stories it invokes, facilitating movement between different times, spaces, and the participants in the assemblage. These trajectories are mutually entangled in the intra‑action where the artifact and participants move between past and present, between historical and present time.

Artifacts have a place in our stories through assemblages ‘where different things and people and places and discourses come together’ (Pennycook 2018: 129). The intra‑action also signifies representations of different geographical places. The participants move around in space while the intra‑action unfolds and features their life trajectory. The participants recall, enter, are positioned in, or talk about places that are embedded in the assemblage and in the story of their transnational belonging. Although the stories are told in Canada, the intra‑action entangles many places in memories. Finland is mediated through stories the creamer brings to life. The fact that Eila’s parents received the creamer in 1932 takes the intra‑action to a time before Eila or Aaro were born, to a space and time when their ancestors lived in Karelia. The participants expressed nostalgia for imaginatively constructed places that were once part of their lives. Remembering these places means remembering late or absent people, experiences, and stories.

We show that the boundary between human and non‑human is not fixed but more contingent and flexible than traditionally understood. Through the case of Eila and Aaro, we illustrate how the creamer operates as a material mediator in their everyday practices and lived trajectories. We do not claim that the creamer talks, but we demonstrate that it has a role in family narratives. It inspires the participants to remember family stories and trajectories across generations, state borders, and historical times. Toohey (2018: 97) writes that identities develop through current discursive practices but also through memories. The creamer tells a story, which is transferred through the voices of Eila and Aaro and their personal, historical, transnational trajectories but also seen in the intra‑action where the researchers participate in the discussion. The artifact participates, takes on meaning, and plays a semiotic role (Pennycook 2018: 46). We agree with Burström (2014: 144) that ‘our social identity is[,] to a large extent[,] dependent on and expressed through things.’ Furthermore, the artifact’s presence creates a physical closeness: one holds it in the hand when using it. Eila expresses a level of emotional closeness attached to the inherited creamer, and the intra‑action ultimately leads to Eila’s emotional description of herself as a ‘true Karelian.’

By observing the situations through the lens of new materialism, we described how the intra‑action connects the lives, spaces, mobilities, past and current times, and inner emotions of the participants. The new materialistic lens allows migration studies to place a stronger emphasis on the active role of non‑humans. The analysis of intra‑action and the assemblages between participants and artifacts offers a novel way of thinking about ethnography. From a new materialist viewpoint, humans are no longer depicted as ‘distinct, inalienable creatures’ who have the sole capacity to control the environment but instead have emerged with their interior (Pennycook 2018: 129). Discourse and matter emerge and unfold in the mutual space (MacLure 2013: 659–660). Here, the participants, Aaro and Eila; the interviewers; and the artifact create a multilayered intra‑action and assemblage, prompted by the shared materiality (see Bennett 2010b: 14), which depicts stories of transnationality in current and past times and spaces. Objects to which individuals are emotionally attached play a significant role in shaping their sense of belonging, their past, and their present. The fact that Eila and Aaro’s offspring were not included in this transgenerational ethnographic research is a limitation to this study but offers an interesting topic for a follow‑up.

The story of the creamer and its owner’s life journeys takes us from the historical events of the Finnish Karelian exodus into Eila’s analysis of her life philosophy. The earliest memories Eila and Aaro have of their family trajectory are their parents’ stories from Karelia, and, after its long transnational trajectory, it is still relevant to the participants after a long‑lived life. The co‑emerge of the artifact has lived through two major historical events: forced migration from Finnish Karelia and Finnish immigration to North America. Through the analysis of the intra‑action, the historical circle of Karelian heritage is closed. It also explains why Eila is who she is.

Through its presence, the creamer inspires and makes the human participants talk. It co‑narrates and co‑acts the story of the family migration. According to the participants, it also hears. The creamer has an influence on what people say, think, and feel about it. It is a part of a family trajectory involving generations of family members, places, and discourses that interconnect in this present setting, in a residence for older adults far away from Finnish Karelia, where the creamer’s earliest stories are set. The creamer is more than just a utility artifact for the participants; its trajectories are embodied in Eila and Aaro’s story. It is present; the participants can touch it; and, while using it, it inspires the participants to re‑experience the past and describe the present reality. Through intra‑action, the old creamer becomes a materialized site of memory, evoking and embodying the presence of people no longer physically present in the participants’ lives. Its material existence is entangled with the lives of all those who have encountered it—those who have kept it, used it, touched it, carried it, and considered it meaningful.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare. The authors are not currently—nor have they ever been—members of the journal’s editorial team or board.