40524839 presents a fictional archive centred on 19th-century engineer Joseph Bazalgette. Through curated objects—a chicken hip bone, Cuban cigar, porcelain ashtray, and altered photographs—it fabricates aspects of his private life, including the death of a beloved chicken and his son Willoughby’s speculative link to Michelin. Combining museological display and cabinet of curiosities, the work explores storytelling as a technology for shaping history. It examines how myth, fact, and fiction blur within archival aesthetics, questioning who holds narrative authority and how historical identities are constructed through layered, and often speculative, material traces.