In 2023, David Mendelsohn had the opportunity to visit the Museum of Victoria and personally document specimens from their archive, including wombat, koala, lyrebird, and echidna, the only bone specimens available to him. These were also native fauna found in  the place of his early childhood—the Bend of Islands in Victoria. Through this opportunity, David developed a body of work entitled, ARCHIVUM, a series of photographic works inscribed with taxonomic references. ARCHIVUM featured the Linnaean classification system, a western cataloguing based on the taxonomy of all living things, and used by all museums. 

ARCHIVUM, essentially, offered the possibility of questioning the archive itself. What is remembered? What is recorded and collected? What is omitted? What is retained? Do these specimens become spectral evidence? Do they become sites of fractured and anxious histories? Does this become an observational unease? Or a concomitant desire to retain the past? These works, then, became spectral representations of the organisms’ presence. 

From this process, David came to the realisation that he was prioritising western scientific methods, only, and felt the need to acknowledge other worldviews, namely, our own Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems—through their art. He began a series of pen and ink drawings by referencing the collections from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) and focused on the bark paintings of David Yirawala. The aim of these drawings was to juxtapose the former works from ARCHIVUM, and, thus, present Western and Indigenous Knowledge Systems side by side, in tandem and equal.