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- Volume 29, Issue 57, 2018
Public - Volume 29, Issue 57, 2018
Volume 29, Issue 57, 2018
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Introduction
Authors: May Chew, Susan Lord and Janine MarchessaultAbstractIntroduction to issue 57.
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Twenty Theses on the Anarchive
By Adam SiegelAbstractA prolegomenon to a re-examination of the archive and other memory institutions is presented.
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Neither/Nor: Other Cinema as an Archives and an Anti-Archives
More LessAbstractThis essay explores Craig Baldwin’s Other Cinema, specifically the 16mm film collection assembled in the basement of San Francisco’s Artists’ Television Access, as both an archives and an anti-archives. How does Baldwin’s interdisciplinary practice, which integrates film collecting, curating, production, and publishing, challenge and expand our understanding of archival activity and consciousness? Examining Baldwin’s accessioning, organizational, and custodial processes and attitudes provides insights into Other Cinema’s dual nature: as a corpus of distinctive postwar documents that evidence histories of political, cultural, social, and scientific endeavor (archives); and a debris bin to be mined for re-workable scraps, forgotten, marginal, or suppressed memories, and unclassifiable anomalies (anti-archives). This opposition is eventually dissolved with the proposition of Other Cinema as a workshop, straddling both functions: conservation through creative destruction.
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Anarchival Impulses: A Performance Theory of Media
By Alanna ThainAbstractI propose the anarchival as a performance theory of media relevant to the current moment. Defining an anarchival movement impulse characteristic of post-digital moving image media through the example of “bullet time” key examples from Gap commercials, toThe Matrix, and dance works on stage and screen (Edouard Lock’s Amélia(2002), and Dave St-Pierre What’s Next? (2011)), I then consider how expanded practices of embodiment are taken up by queer and feminist artists in three recent works (Nikki Forrest’s Flip/Bend (2012) Catherine Lavoie Marcus and Priscilla Guy’s Singeries(2016), and WIVES Action Movie (2017).
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Awakening from the Gendered Archive: Archiveology and Critical Cultural History
More LessAbstractThis paper picks up one of the threads of my book, Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, in which I define archiveology as a practice of collecting images and compiling them in new and surprising ways. Performed by artists and independent filmmakers, working in a variety of audiovisual media, archiveology is an essayistic form, insofar as filmmakers are taking up previously used material as the basis of a film language. This paper explores the implications of archiveology for a feminist film practice, using the example of The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (Rania Stephan, 2011). With reference to recent feminist theory concerning the film archive, I argue that the metaphor of “awakening” becomes legible as a formal technique of archiveology most clearly in the case of the gendered archive.
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Disrupting the Register: TreatyCard.ca and Indigenous Counter-Archives
More LessAbstractThis essay analyzes the Indian Register as a key source of documentation in the archive of settler colonial law and Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s (Cree/Métis) TreatyCard.ca as a counter-archival disruption to the state’s archive. The Canadian government’s system of “Indian” registration and the archive it has generated served to literalize the claims of the Indian Act. Parts one and two of this essay historically contextualize the Indian Register and attend to its application forms as a key site of colonial law’s archival operation. Part three analyzes TreatyCard.ca as an alternative register that makes visible the limited frames of visibility that the Indian Register imposes on Indigenous identity and prompts a counter-reading of the Register’s archival function. The counter-archival disruption of TreatyCard.ca creates a radically open register wherein participants author and authorize their own identities at a remove from the state’s sovereign archival desires.
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Traces of a Revolution: In Search of the Palestinian Film Archive
More LessAbstractThis paper analyzes two documentaries that examine the legacy of the Palestinian Film Unit: Azza El-Hassan’s Kings and Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image (2004) and Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory by MohanadYaqubi (2015). Relying on recently found footage as well as interviews and personal accounts, the documentaries recount the importance of the collective’s archive and the impact it had on creating the image of the revolutionary Palestinian. I argue that rather than dwelling on the loss of a Palestinian image, the filmmakers move beyond the impulse to physically locate the archive, providing sites of regeneration that allow alternative narratives to emerge instead. Through the filmmakers’ dialectic disruption of their own attempt to restore the archive, both films pose highly complex questions about the meaning ofthe photographic image and its potential in effecting social or political change.
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Hip Hop Archives or an Archive of Hip Hop? A Remix Impulse
More LessAbstractThe archivization of hip hop history by American Universities has been a reality for at least one decade, at schools like Harvard, Cornell and Tulane. Institutions of higher learning are, in the words of Foucault producing discursive possibilities for the public life of hip hop histories, creating what is sayable (Foucault 1969:61). Simultaneously, the archivization of hip hop by American Universities is also a “privileging” project, as Mbembe suggests, conferring “status” on information that can shape the future of knowledge production (2002:20). What is at stake here, is not just the future of what can be said, but also the role of a counter, rogue or institutional archive in honouring the ethos of hip hop culture in ways that do not empty the culture of its innovative and interventional aesthetic approach topower.
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I, MABEL HAMPTON, POLITICAL POWER AND THE ARCHIVE
More LessAbstractThe relationship between the historical production of the archive and the construction of social bodies enforced patriarchal authority in many state archives. The cultural implications of the archive and the edifice of the social body, particularly for queer, gendered and racialized bodies are explored as a duality between oppressive laws and social change. The queer archive, gathered over time through multifarious processes evokes both a sense of loss and recuperation. As a location for memory that historically has been entrenched in erasure, this essay considers how historical violence can be reorganized through anti-oppressive frameworks, where the counter-archive has agency to speak for itself. Theoretical models such as the ‘gathering together’ of data that consigns subjectivity and unifies concepts of social knowledge (Derrida, Archive Fever) is explored through a suspicion of archival logic that historically advanced social control and violence (Rancière, Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization; Sekula, The Body and The Archive). The case study is Mabel Hampton, an African-American lesbian, whose legacy is preserved at the Lesbian Herstory Archive (LHA). Hampton donated her large collection to LHA as a politicized act of queer remembrance. While, I argue the social body was a triumph for the bourgeois order, where political economy was entwined into capitalism and imperialism, and sexual conduct was converted into political behavior, Mabel Hampton demonstrates that axiomatic domination of paternal state violence can be ruptured. In her own words, her story is entrenched in systematic violence of poverty, incarceration and rape, and is a collection of exile and refusal as well as persistence and survival (Love, Feeling Backward).
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SEARCHING FOR BLACK VOICESIN CANADA’S ARCHIVES: The Invisibility of a “Visible” Minority
More LessAbstractUsing case studies of my experiences navigating the difficult terrain of Canadian archives, as well as, black Canadian history examples such as Nova Scotia’s Viola Desmond and the No. 2 Construction Battalion, Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley, Alberta’s Amber Valley and Montreal’s Sir George Williams University (present-day Concordia University), my article elucidates the visibility/invisibility of blackness in Canadian archival collections. It also explains why it is so important for researchers doing work on black subjects to begin to understand the logic of archives, working against (and through them) to recuperate historical absences, and to shed light on presences.
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Commemoration and Decolonization in the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Database
Authors: Shawna Ferris, Kiera Ladner, Danielle Allard and Micheline HughesAbstractThe Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Database (MMIWD) is,at present, an activist archive comprised of thousands of Indigenous and non-Indigenous news reports relating to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-spirit (MMIWG2) persons in Canada. Through an exploration of the development of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Database, including the development of our collections, our descriptive practices, and our participatory methods, this paper examines what it means for the MMIWD to engage in archival decolonization. It considers what kinds of (archival) interventions we can develop or employ to (re)frame MMIWG2-related mainstream news media reports. Perhaps most importantly it discusses the possibilities for this project to create something more than a counter-archive that reacts to colonial violence but does not itself provide or inspire decolonizing visions of a post-colonial political reality in which such violence is no longer a reality.
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Trade Catalogue of Everything
Authors: Richard Ibghy and Marilou LemmensAbstractThe Trade Catalogue of Everything is a digital file that lists everything and anything—land, water, air, plants, animals, fragments of nature, but also the products of human culture, industry, invention and human know-how—that may be of interest to alien life. Housed in a gold USB flash memory device, the catalogue is intended for travel aboard a probe headed toward the stars beyond our solar system. Following in the footsteps of the Pioneer Plaque (1972–1973) and The Golden Record (1977), which introduced human civilization to extraterrestrials, the catalogue is an invitation for spacefaring civilizations to make contact with Earth and begin a trade relationship.
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Fugitives: Anarchival Materiality in Archives
Authors: Kate Hennessy and Trudi Lynn SmithAbstractIn analog and digital archives, issues of material loss are met with tools of resistance, ranging from simple freezers, to fire-resistant bunkers, to complex robotic systems. While entropy is usually resisted by archivists, this paper draws attention to what we call anarchival materiality, or the generative force of entropy in archives. We theorize anarchival materiality through our oral history research with archivists and curators and parallel video and photography work in the British Columbia Provincial Archives. We describe how non-human archives and their human stewards both constrain and enable preservation. Classification systems, spatial organization and human responsibilities are all fundamentally reshaped and determined by the uncooperative residents of archives, who constantly remind their caretakers of the transformative and organic passage of time.
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TEMPLATING LIFE: DNA as Nature’s Hard Drive
By Mél HoganAbstractDNA is being touted as the newest and most promising storage technology, especially for fixed, long-term storage. While there have already been many successful experiments encoding/decoding data onto DNA (such as moving images, software, text and computer viruses), little reflection has been done on this kind of innovation in relation to DNA’s colonial legacy: its linking of race and genetics, forensic anthropology, DNA profiling, tracking migrational history, and so on. As such, my contribution to Public is in exploring the promise of DNA as a medium for data storage by complicating and questioning its potential as a site for ongoing conquest and/or decolonization.
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Considering Todd’s Tape: The Textual Transition of Videotape Miscellany
More LessAbstractHomemade video-recordings of television broadcasts are both archival and anarchival in nature. This essay considers the particular contributions of “miscellaneous” videotape recordings as precarious documents of television heritage and expressions of place-based cultural memory. In transcribingtelevision broadcasts, miscellaneous video-recordings createdpalimpsests of ephemeral content. No longer in active use, miscellaneous tapes have undergone a transition from dynamic and re-recordable to static texts. In describing the content of one example from Nova Scotia, Canada, this essay considers what miscellaneous videotapes have become after their textual turn.
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Ice as a Counter-Archive: Permafrost, Archival Melt and Climate Futures
More LessAbstractIn the history of Canadian Arctic colonization, ice and permafrost have been understood primarily as an engineering problem. During the Cold War however, understanding of permafrost and its possibilities changed. Microbiologists and geoscientists did not see permafrost as a hindrance, but rather for understanding the past. As permafrost freezes, organics, air and water become trapped, and as the permafrost grows thicker, so too the earliest trapped matter is buried deeper. Through chemical and genomic analysis, permafrosttoday can reveal details about the past. For scientists today, permafrost has collected, ordered and preserved a lost world of climate environments. This paper examines how political imperatives, petroleum industry and government scientists worked together in the 20th century Canadian North to construct permafrost as an archive of the past. It also posits that these icy (and now rapidly melting) archives should play a critical role in our global future.
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TOWARDS A FILM MICOLOGY?: Biodeteriorated Archival Images of Havana as Incurable-Images of the Cinematic City
More LessAbstractThe proliferation of documentaries about Havana’s ruins during the Special Period has coincided with the biodeterioration of moving images filmed in Havana during the revolutionary period and collected in Cuba’s National Film Archive. Havana’s cinematic ruinology is therefore the story of a twofold material helplessness: the helplessness of a crumbling city, whose ruins appear in front of the camera, and the helplessness of the moving images of Havana’s past, which may soon vanish from the archive. Rather than equating biodeterioration with the death of cinema, the author appeals to TarekElhaik's notion of incurable-image to elaborate a concept of film micology as a semiotic engagement with the filmic mutations associated with celluloid'sbiodeterioration.The article offers a semio-micological analysis of CascosBlancos (Fernando Pérez, 1975), a biodeteriorated Cuban housing documentary from the 1970's, to highlight how the challenges posed by biodeterioration destabilize our conceptions of audiovisual heritage, collective memory, and both archival and historical images.
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“ABSENTEE INFORMATION”: Lucy R. Lippard’s MoMA Library Intervention—From Decision to Stance
By Adam LauderAbstract“Absentee Information,”Lucy R. Lippard’s contribution to the iconic catalogue for INFORMATION(1970), the era-definingMoMA exhibition curated by KynastonMcShine, illuminates the informational and proto-feminist logics underpinning the innovative critic-curator’s approach to problems of community decision amidst her transition to a feminist position. The contemporary “non-philosophy” of François Laruelle suggests a new path of approach to Lippard’s instruction- and choice-based methodology as seizing upon contemporaneous manifestations of “digitality” in Conceptual art, but redescribing the tautological structures of mainstream conceptualism in emphatically situated terms—as a lived “stance.” This article traces the sources of Lippard’s library intervention, contextualizing “Absentee Information” within contemporaneous artistic, political and information-theoretic currents.
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HORIZONTAL MENTORSHIP: A Preservation Solution for Marginalized and Underrepresented Audio-Visual Works
Authors: Mary Kidd and Marie LascuAbstractThe “magnetic media crisis” is the idea that media created over the past century is at risk of degrading and becoming unplayable over the next 20 years. This poses an enormous challenge for content that falls outside of the collecting scope of well-resourced institutions. Audio-visual preservation on a shoestring budget is being addressed head-on by New York City’s XFR Collective (pronounced Transfer Collective). At the core of XFR’s mission is lowering the barriers to audio-visual preservation, especially material from marginalized and/or underrepresented communities. The collective’s success stems from fostering a “horizontal mentorship model,” which supports the idea that audio-visual preservation skills can be taught to anyone, given they are provided with accessible documentation, tools, and instruction. The hope is that individuals and groups may adapt XFR’s model to address their own community’s at-risk media.
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NIGHTSENSE
Authors: Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick
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