decolonising archives

8/20/2019 Decolonising archives

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DECOLONISING

ARCHIVES


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A PUBLICATION OF L’INTERNATIONALE BOOKS

DECOLONISING

ARCHIVES

COVER CREDIT

Footage for unfinished film about Guinean women. Labels on the

reels: women at work, women at school, women in politics, womenmother, farming women. INCA, Sana na N’Hada and Flora Gomes, 1979.

http://www.internationaleonline.org/


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L’INTERNATIONALE ONLINE – DECOLONISING ARCHIVES – 3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

4Introduction

9 Radically

De-Historicising the Archive.Decolonising Archival Memory

from the Supremacyof Historical DiscourseWolfgang Ernst

17 Buried (and) AliveJeffrey Schnapp

23 H[gun shot]owc[gun shot]an I

f[gun shot]orget? Lawrence Abu Hamdan

25 Another Mappingof Art and Politics.

The Archive Policiesof Red Conceptualismos del Sur

Ana Longoni /Red Conceptualismos del Sur

32 Decolonial Sensibilities:

Indigenous Researchand Engaging with Archives

in ContemporaryColonial Canada

Crystal Fraser and Zoe Todd

40 In Search For

Queer AncestorsKarol Radziszewski

50 The Hump

of Colonialism,or The Archive as a Site

of ResistanceRona Sela

58 A Grin

without MarkerFilipa César

73 Presenting Pasts

Andrea Stultiens

79 The Archives of the Commons

Seminar, Madrid 2015Mela Dávila and Carlos Prietodel Campo (Museo Nacional

Centro de Arte Reina Sofía),Marisa Pérez Colina

(Fundación de los Comunes)and Mabel Tapia

(Red Conceptualismos del Sur)

90 Archives of the Commons:

Knowledge Commons,Information, and Memory

Carlos Prieto del Campo

102 Biographies


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INTRODUCTION

DECOLONISING ARCHIVES



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Decolonising Archives is a second publication in theL’Internationale Research strand of DecolonisingPractices. Following Decolonising Museums, the cur-rent publication focuses on the archive and the waysof recovering its political potential not only in relationto history but, more urgently, to the present. In a simi-lar way to museums and other traditional institutions

of the European nation states (though their roots areof course much older), the archives have in the lastdecades undergone significant changes towardshigher accessibility and transparency, facilitatedmainly through the advances of the digital technolo-gies. These changes have resulted in new challengeswhich offer unforeseen possibilities for democratisa-tion both in terms of access and knowledge produc-

tion by new, often marginalised, voices. At the sametime, many archives around the world inhabit a fineline between the risks of neglect and decay on onehand, and privatisation and fetishisation due to theirrising market value on the other hand. The archivaltreasure hunt to satisfy the growing demand of insti-tutions in the old and new imperial centres is just one

example of coloniality as a condition outliving colo-nialism itself and continuing to discipline archives interms of access and political instrumentalisation.

The decolonisation of archives has a broadermeaning beyond interrogating the colonial legacyand existing, or even emerging, neo-colonial powerrelations. For the purpose of this publication, we

have chosen to address decolonisation on two lev-els. The first level challenges the commodification ofthe archive and attempts to manage it as capital. Thesecond level dwells in recognising that the seem-ingly neutral Western criteria and classifications arein fact tools for maintaining the role of an archiveas an imperial project of domination and affirma-tion. While the former addresses mainly the issues of

ownership, accessibility and control, these also reg-ulate the conditions for the latter, i.e. understandingthe archives as sites of knowledge production andpolitical resistance, interpretation and challenge tothe ruling exclusive classifications.

In recent years, we have witnessed the revolu-tionary redefinition of archives through digitisation


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and online sharing. Digitisation and online sharingof vast amounts of archival documents can however,when they are done with no reflection, easily turninto a pseudo-democratic end in itself, resulting in anoverload of the material available online. Such mis-guided generosity can solidify rather than challengethe established Western narratives when colonisedarchives merely supplement and thus confirm theirprimacy. Yet, if understood as a creative chance, digi-tisation can become a true decolonial tool. As navi-gation and retrieval become of critical importancedue to the abundance of digitised material, scholars

within the field of digital humanities, as well as art-ists, point out new algorithms and semantic searchas new more welcoming guides rather than obsoletegatekeepers. While progressive code writers willundoubtedly continue to play an indispensable rolein making the archives more accessible and demo-cratic, most of the decolonisation is, however, to bedone on the epistemological level. It is precisely here

that artists play a crucial role when they engage witharchives and unearth testimonies which put the offi-cial historical narrative into question or reframe whatis seemingly known and highlight its inner contradic-tions to resist simplifying homogenisation.

The contributions in this publication can besplit into four sections. The three opening texts

are dedicated to the critical potential of the digital.Wolfgang Ernst argues for the understanding of thearchival order as an alternative to the dominance ofthe narrative history of the traditional nation state;while Jeffrey Schnapp sees as the priority for digi-tal humanists the design of an effective mechanismto activate or sustain cultural memory, as well as theurgency of so-called “crisis archiving”. LawrenceAbu Hamdan points out the biased nature of surveil-lance technologies that establish new hierarchies ofinformation as well as “noise” which is disregardedfor its incompatibility with the dominant narratives of

violence in “troubled” neighbourhoods.In the following section, Ana Longoni (RedConceptualismos del Sur), Crystal Fraser and ZoeTodd, and Karol Radziszewski describe three differ-ent geo-political situations where the authors them-selves belong to the communities they speak for.Ana Longoni presents the Southern ConceptualismsNetwork’s sustained efforts to reactivate the dis-

ruptive power and catalysing potential of the LatinAmerican conceptual practices (which are continu-ously neutralised by both state violence and marketlogic) as an antagonistic force within contemporarycognitive capitalism. Crystal Fraser and Zoe Toddconfront the reader with the difficulties of gainingaccess to the archival material connected to the


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Indigenous populations guarded by the institutionsof the settler state of Canada. Karol Radziszewskiproposes strategies for resistance against homopho-bia on one hand and rainbow colonisation from theWest on the other, by revealing daring queer ances-tors in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in other

“peripheries” worldwide.The third section consists of three contribu-

tions by decolonial advocates self-reflecting ontheir privileged positions with regards the mate-rial they have access to. The common question forRona Sela, Filipa César and Andrea Stultiens con-

cerns undoing, or at least avoiding perpetuation, ofthe neo-colonial epistemologies. Rona Sela reflectson projects by both Israeli and Palestinian artists,including herself as an Israeli scholar, de-maskingthe ideological framing of Palestine-related archi-val material in Israeli archives. The contribution byFilipa César, based on her work with film archivesfrom Guinea-Bissau, continuing the work begun

by Chris Marker and others decades ago, points toongoing battles for the recognition of certain mate-rials as relevant, despite continuous dismissals bythe authorities. Andrea Stultiens shares with thereader her eye-opening experiences during herlong-term engagement with photographic legacy inUganda leading to the HIP Uganda project.

In the closing section, two essays were written inconnection with the Archives of the Commons semi-nar (Madrid, 11 and 12 December 2015) organisedby Museo Reina Sofía, Fundación de los Comunes(Commons Foundation) and Red Conceptualismosdel Sur (Southern Conceptualisms Network). A col-lective text by Mela Dávila and Carlos Prieto delCampo(Museo Reina Sofía), Marisa Pérez Colina(Fundación de los Comunes) and Mabel Tapia (RedConceptualismos del Sur) offers an overview of thecore areas touched upon during the conferencesuch as the politics of the archives, archive econo-

mies, and techno-political devices. Carlos Prieto delCampo expands on this by unpacking the MuseoReina Sofía’s vision of the archive as “an engine forpolitical activation in the present”. He discusses howarchives of the commons can serve as a vessel forcollective memory and how they can be opened up tothe general public.

The collective project Luta ca caba inda dis-

cussed by Filipa César acknowledges that thestruggle is not over yet; similarly, this publicationis considered as the beginning of a series ratherthan a final word. Archives play a crucial role forL’Internationale and its institutions who hope notonly to develop progressive institutional practicesfor their own archives but also to raise a discussion


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beyond this first and therefore necessarily limitedaccount. New voices overcoming the Eurocentriclegacy of L’Internationale will be invited in thefuture to contribute to, and continue, the discussionstarted here.


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RESOURCES — L’INTERNATIONALE BOOKS

RADICALLYDEHISTORICISING THE

ARCHIVE. DECOLONISING ARCHIVAL MEMORY FROM

THE SUPREMACY OF

HISTORICAL DISCOURSEWOLFGANG ERNST



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L’INTERNATIONALE ONLINE – WOLFGANG ERNST – 10

RADICALLY DE-HISTORICISING THE ARCHIVE – WOLFGANG ERNST

Unfolding the layersof the “colonised” archive

In cultural discourse, in the art world and in politi-cal activism, the term “archive” has mostly becomea generalised metaphor for different kinds of col-

lections of traces from the past. While in public dis-course the archive is mostly (mis-)understood asthe “content” of the archive (its records, its databanks), in archival sciences the term rather refers tothe organising structure. Against intellectual or artis-tic fantasies of “the anarchival” (Fürlus & Giannetti2014), the digital archive is still rigorously rooted inits techno-mathematical structure, while the dynar-

chive lies between the archival and the anarchivalspheres.The administrative archive in the strict sense

is a read-only memory. One cannot simply take outarchival records because they are politically incor-rect, neither can the archival order as such (key term

“tectonics”) be easily changed according to a new

discursive will. Just like in computing, a rewriting ofcode in the operating system would make the wholefunction collapse. It is exactly the non-discursive andnon-narrative structure of the archive which makesit such a uniquely powerful institution. Therefore,acts such as revealing the genealogy of the institu-tional archives as grounded in the imperial nation

states have to operate on an epistemological level,through non-invasive re-reading, un-covering theties between archive and narrative history as masterdiscourse of the traditional nation state.

Digital archiving, as Friedrich Kittler has pointedout, could break up the alliance that the institutionalarchives have maintained with historiography andhistoricism since 1800. Moreover, the chronologi-

cal sequence could be replaced by an order of co-presence once their combinatory connections werelocated (Kittler 1996, p. 75).

The digitisation of vast amounts of archivalrecords brings a creative chance. Applying creativealgorithms to experiment with new forms of navigat-ing enormous amounts of archival signals and data


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rise of research-based history as an academic dis-cipline co-originated with the new impulse to go(back) to the archives. The rise of the modern nationstate required a foundational narrative of its tempo-ral genealogy, resulting in a re-organisation of thearchives “in the name of history” as a new discourse

– provided by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in thecase of Prussia, with a proper philosophy of historywhich gave the state a deep-temporal sense andteleological (“metahistorical” in Hayden White’ssense) justification, with the present state as itshappy end. Via the historical discourse, the admin-

istrative state which is an infra-structural function(and represents the symbolic order of power) couldbe transformed into an imaginary called “nation”.

Archival order as non-narrativealternative to historiography

Beyond the “cultural turn” of the last two or threedecades concerned with cultural and collectivememory, the critical focus has now shifted to theanalysis of techno-cultural temporal dynamics ofsocial, administrative and technological systems. The

(textual or audio-visual) results in new insights bymathematical intelligence like entropy values, sto-chastic analysis and similarity-based retrieval. Suchoperations are possible in computational space with-out destroying the material and symbolic order of theexisting archive.

Similar media-archaeological approaches to thedigitised archive allow new readings of the archive.Yet the archive – with the new digitised infra-struc-tures linked online to data circulation, storage, pro-cessing and surveillance on the Internet – is at thesame time colonised in new and unexpected ways by

non-human agencies like the NSA (National SecurityAgency). What look like creative applications of soft-ware in big data research by digital humanities arenothing but a side-product of data processing avant-gardes developed by intelligence services.

De-historisation: De-couplingthe archive from the nation state

The modern archive is closely related to the territo-rial nation state. With scholars like Jules Micheletin France and Leopold von Ranke in Germany, the


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early twentieth century avant-garde which “ques-tioned all models of memory (especially narrativeones), favouring openly dynamic, discontinuousforms contiguous with the modern means of tech-nological reproduction – especially photographyand film” (Ernst 2010). An archival collection of pho-tographs as accumulation (different from privatephoto albums) does not yet constitute a meaningfulstory; on the contrary, it rather deconstructs narrative.Archival logistics of ordering images undercut theiconologic narrative by discrete counting (alphanu-meric metadata). Here, the tight coupling of symbolic

evidence in forms of oral or literary “history” is beingreplaced by a loose archival coupling (truly “mediatic”in Fritz Heider’s terms), a process that – according toAllan Sekula’s analysis – started already in the nine-teenth century (Sekula 1986, p. 58).

archive is set in motion (Ernst 2010). Let us thereforeaddress the archive not as a coherent depository formemory supply but instead identify its multiplicity oftemporal layers with and within memory technologies.Since the notion of the archive has been extendedfrom the symbolic order (alphabetical texts) to thestorage of signals (like physical sound and imagery),a memory has emerged which is capable of address-ing human perception in a kind of repeatable hyper-presence. This does not only re-present, but actuallyenacts different aggregations of the past.

My epistemological intention is to liberate archi-

val memory from its reductive subjection to the dis-course of history and re-install it as an agency ofmultiple temporal poetics in its own right. In the con-text discussed here, (media-) archaeology is not justan auxiliary discipline to history, but as well a genu-inely alternative model of processing data from thematerial archives of the past. While historical dis-course strives for narrative coherence, the archaeo-

logical aesthetics deals with discrete, serial stringsof information which – in an age of computing – gainsnew plausibility against literary forms of historicalimagination developed in the nineteenth century.

As data bank structures, the archival mode ofmemory (record management) is a non-narrativealternative to historiography, in the best tradition of

Monumentality

as suspense (epoché) fromthe temporal economy

Against the background of archives which areincreasingly in motion, let us try a counter-analysis


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Magnetic core memory, a technological form of dynamic short-time archiving

in early digital electronic computing. Photo: Benjamin Renter. Copyright:

Media Archaeological Fundus at Humboldt-University, Berlin (Media Studies).


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With increasing mobility and acceleration,should we rather value the immobile archive for itstime-resisting virtue? Archival resistance againstchange is indeed a virtue in the age of networkeddocuments which dissolve into memory-bufferedstreaming data. The acceleration counter-reactivelyleads to a wish to arrest movement for longer inter-vals or at least for moments – a “katechontic” coun-ter-aesthetics usually associated with the archive.But archives of movement, in the age of YouTube andUbuWeb, themselves get in motion (Knörer 2011).

The idea of an archive in motion is a paradox:

the archive is traditionally that which arrests time,which stops all motion. For nineteenth century his-torians, the archive was in its essence an institutionthat made it possible to access “frozen” sections ofpast time. But the technological developments in thetwentieth century – the introduction of the phono-graph and film – have inevitably forced the archive toconfront the question of mobility, both practically and

conceptually. Later, the transition from an archive ofmotion to the notion of an archive in motion is associ-ated with the advent of computer technologies andultimately, the Internet, where constant transfer andupdating functions as well as “live” communicationand interaction redefine the temporality of the archi-val document itself.

which defends archival resistance. The archive mightnow – as a retroactive effect – re-discover its virtueas institutional monument: to take out values from theever-accelerating circulation and electronic economy,to arrest, fix and maintain chosen items; thus turningfloating records from contextual documents (files) intodiscrete monuments (as defined in the “Introduction”to Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge), intospatio-temporal “chronotopes” (Mikhail Bakhtin),epoché as sublation, taken out of time.

Contrary to the archives of physical memorymedia (paper records, celluloid film, magnetic tape)

characterised by limitations of access due to thefragile nature of these documents (Prelinger 2009,p. 271), the current liberal, broadened, electroni-cally-biased (thus liberated from spatial and materialrestrictions) use of the term archive, the online datacollections labeled archives could in fact, as FrankKessler and Mirko Tobias Schäfer proposed, be bet-ter characterised as perpetual transmission rather

than permanent storage (Kessler & Schäfer, p. 276).What used to be sacred spaces, secluded from publicinsight – the arcana of political administration and oftheir archival memory – is now directly wired to thecommunication circuit of the present. The archiveloses its temporal exclusivity as a space remote fromthe immediate present.


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less concerned with records for eternity than withorder by fluctuation. As a result, new challenges arise:what if the public will prefer to use Google rather thaninstitutional Internet portals to get access and infor-mation on national, academic and cultural memory?In other words, will the World Wide Web, Web 2.0 andthe emerging Realtime Net replace the traditionalguardians of memory such as archives, libraries andmuseums, just as Internet radio and IPTV (InternetProtocol Television) are replacing the traditionalbroadcasting media?

— Kessler, F. and Schäfer, M.T. 2009, “Navigating YouTube:

Constituting a Hybrid Information Management System”,

in P. Snickars, P. Vonderau (eds.), The YouTube Reader,

National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, pp. 268-74.

— Kittler, F. 1996, “Museums on the Digital Frontier”,

in T. Keenan (ed.), The End(s) of the Museum,

Fondació Antoni Tápies, Barcelona, pp. 67-80.— Knörer, E. 2011, “Trainingseffekte. Arbeiten mit YouTube

und UbuWeb”, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, vol. 5,

no. 2, pp. 163-66.

— Prelinger, R. 2009, “The Appearance of Archives”,

in P. Snickars, P. Vonderau (eds.), The YouTube Reader,

National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, pp. 268-74.

— Sekula, S. 1986, “The Body and the Archive”, October,

no. 39, pp. 3-64.

— van Tijen, T. 1994, “We no longer collect the Carrier

but the Information”, interviewed by G. Lovink, trans.

J. Boekbinder, MediaMatic, vol. 8, no. 1, viewed

15 December 2015.

— White, H. 1973, Metahistory: The historical imagination

in nineteenth-century Europe, The Johns Hopkins University

Press, Baltimore/London.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

— Chun, W. 2011, “The Enduring Ephemeral, or The FutureIs a Memory”, in E. Huhtamo and J. Parikka (eds.),

Media Archaeology. Approaches, Applications, and

Implications, University of California Press, Berkeley,

Los Angeles, London, pp. 184-203.

— Ernst, W. 2010, “Cultural Archive versus Technomathematical

Storage”, in E. Røssaak (ed.), The Archive in Motion.

New Conceptions of the Archive in Contemporary Thought

and New Media Practices, Novus, Oslo, pp. 53-73.

— Foucault, M. (1972—2002), Archaeology of Knowledge,

trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith [*1972], Routledge Classics,London / New York.

— Fürlus, E. and Giannetti, C. (eds.) 2014, AnArchive(s).

A Minimal Encyclopedia on Archaeology of the Arts and Media,

Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg.

— Heider, F. (1927—1959), “Thing and medium”, in F. Heider,

On perception, event-structure and psychological environ-

ment (Selected papers, pp. 1-34). Psychological Issues,

no. 1, pp. 1-123.

http://www.mediamatic.net/8989/en/we-no-longer-collect-the-carrier-but-thehttp://www.mediamatic.net/8989/en/we-no-longer-collect-the-carrier-but-thehttp://www.mediamatic.net/8989/en/we-no-longer-collect-the-carrier-but-thehttp://www.mediamatic.net/8989/en/we-no-longer-collect-the-carrier-but-the


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BURIEDAND ALIVE

JEFFREY SCHNAPP



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L’INTERNATIONALE ONLINE – JEFFREY SCHNAPP – 18

BURIED (AND) ALIVE – JEFFREY SCHNAPP

Like the royal burial grounds with which they wereonce associated, archives were born as sites of long-term conservation whose contents were thought tohave transcended temporal bounds. Few categoriesof materials were believed to be worthy of elevationinto their supratemporal ether. There was little spacefor documenting the evanescent or contested fea-tures of human existence, not to mention the actionsof contemporaries or peripheries, in the archivum.

In the course of their modern history, archiveshave undergone a democratisation that touchesevery aspect of their existence, from the nature ofthe documents collected to practices of organisa-tion and consultation to the design of the edificesthat house them. Archives now collect more varieties

of media and materials than in any preceding epoch.These materials are increasingly accessible both on-site and off-site. Analogue objects lead double livesalongside digital surrogates surrounded by growinghaloes of metadata, data, and capta. They do so in anarray of media that extends cultural memory beyondthe hand and eye to, for instance, the ear. Last but not

least, this expanded sensorium of cultural memoryis accompanied by new forms of capture that allowfor time-scales that would have been inconceivableonly a century ago: from documentation of macro-events that occur over centuries (like environmentalchanges) to that of micro-events that occur on thescale of seconds (viz. snapshots and tweets).

The above narrative might smack of triumpha-lism if the march towards democratisation, prolifera-tion, and an expanded concept of the cultural recorddidn’t have nested within it a series of challengesthat are also opportunities for renewal. The latterencompass a rethinking of uniform processing andconservation practices; new models of search, dis-covery, and retrieval, as well as information use and

sharing; outreach to audiences that are infrequentlyserved by traditional brick-and-mortar archives; anaugmented approach to description and catalogu-ing that treats every cultural object not as a singularentity but as a web of relations; and even a rethink-ing of the very notion of “archive” along more flexibleand fluid lines. In short, a seismic shift well beyond


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the fine-grained knowledge thathas the potential to make contem-porary materials matter is associ-ated with the lived experience ofparticipants and witnesses, aswell as communities of expertisesuch as researchers and schol-ars. To delay their access untilsome hypothetical future moment when professionalarchivists will have had the time and (hypotheti-cal) resources to process them can amount to a defacto death sentence. A better option, particularly inthe case contemporary multimedial repositories, isto involve such interested communities in the con-struction and design of such animated archives rightfrom the start. Archives live or die, are rememberedor forgotten as a function of being sustained by liv-ing communities, and it is those communities them-selves that must be brought into the picture in orderto reduce the loss of living knowledge (which is, in

turn, one significant key to future value and use). Toclarify: it is not a matter of simply crowdsourcing thelabour of processing, but rather of embracing data-base designs that balance inreach with outreach, thedevelopment of rigorous and reliable core recordswith the input of communities of expertise and otherinterested/ affected parties.

the scope of these brief reflections in which I wouldlike to consider three specific challenges: questionsof quantity, scale and fragility.

First, quantity . By their very nature, modern insti-tutions of memory have always been hoarders. Addedto the ever-growing mass of the analogue and oftenduplicating them, digital archival assets have drivenhome a point that already applied to their analoguepredecessors: namely, that mere aggregation ofmaterials and/ or their digitisation is not, in and ofitself, a gesture of conservation, not to mention aneffective mechanism for activating or sustainingcultural memory. Storage is easy; activation is diffi-cult. But a cultural heritage that lives on only as stor-age, whether in warehouses or in server farms, is nota living cultural heritage in any meaningful way. Sohow to manage the inevitable and, indeed, welcomeoverflows?

There is no single or simple answer becausearchives come in multiple shapes and sizes. One

thing, however, seems certain: however invaluable,traditional top-down approaches to the processing ofmaterials and the construction of archival reposito-ries are, at best, an incomplete solution. This, becauseof the quantities and variety of materials involved aswell as the fragility of their “qualities.” As the DigitalArchive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters ¹ suggests, much of

1. The Digital Archive

of Japan’s 2011 Disasters

(JDA) is an online

portal to digital materi-

als documenting the natu-

ral and man-made disas-

ters that began in Japanon 11 March 2011:

www.jdarchive.org/en/

home

http://www.jdarchive.org/en/homehttp://www.jdarchive.org/en/homehttp://www.jdarchive.org/en/homehttp://www.jdarchive.org/en/home


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information, and build the sorts of human-scalearguments that contribute to the advancement ofknowledge.

The challenge intensifies in the case of vast,interconnected, multimedial digital repositories.There was already far too much to sift through andmake sense of; now there is exponentially more. Buthere a new set of inventorial affordances (basedupon data, metadata, and capta) makes it possibleto operate on new and expanded scales thanks tocomputational techniques. Among these are toolsthat translate vast numbers of objects into aggregatevisualisations that can be viewed from the perspec-tive of a multiplicity of data fields. The resulting rep-resentations tell new stories on macro scales aboutmatters such as the history of collecting practicesor institutions or taxonomical shifts. But they arenot self-evident objects of human experience. Onthe contrary, they are technical constructs, abstrac-tions that have to be critically crafted by means of a

multitude of tools and techniques in order to gener-ate artefacts that enhance knowledge, persuade, ormake sense. This is not merely a technical task: it isthe sort of cultural task being undertaken by digitalhumanists that involves technology, design, and aclear-headed sense of how to reconnect the worldof open archives back to that middle stratum where

metaLAB ² played a key role inshaping the Digital Archive ofJapan’s 2011 Disasters into a pro-

totype of what my colleagues and I like to call “cri-sis archiving”. Known as the JDA, the project seeksto expand the compass of how memories are built in,attend to, and serve the present while, at the sametime, ensuring the transmission of the past to futuregenerations. Participatory in character, federative indesign (involving partners from Yahoo! Japan to theNational Diet Library and Archive.org), encompassingmedia types from tweets and photographs to testi-monials generated on-site to websites and video, theJDA is made up not only of documents but also andmost of all of the beehive-like curatorial and interpre-tive activities of the community that animates it: acommunity that includes everyone from victims andactivists to policymakers and journalists to students,scholars, and environmental scientists.

A second challenge is cognitive and pertains to

both the macro and micro scales of experiencing cul-tural objects. Of course, it goes without saying thatarchives assume the form of extremely large assem-blages. Navigating them would lie well beyond thecapabilities of the human mind were it not for sup-ports such as inventories and finding aids whichallow researchers to burrow in, locate and retrieve

2. For more information

on metaLAB: http://meta-

lab.harvard.edu

http://metalab.harvard.edu/http://metalab.harvard.edu/http://metalab.harvard.edu/http://metalab.harvard.edu/


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Fig. 0 Caption TK L’INTERNATIONALE ONLINE – JEFFREY SCHNAPP – 21


A still from metaLAB (at) Harvard's

Teaching with Things demonstration

project (2013; project PI's Battles/

Loukissas/Schnapp) with a multimedia

descriptive record on the left and a

timeline of annotations on the right.

A still from metaLAB (at) Harvard's

Teaching with Things demonstration

project (2013; project PI's Battles/

Loukissas/Schnapp) showing an “artifac-

tual interface” that allows visitors to

annotate features of a three-dimensional

scan of an ancient Greek ostrakon.


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researchers. But, for the very same reasons, digitalassets are volatile, menaced by bit rot, and subject tomisunderstanding and manipulation. Digital-specifictechniques of conservation are still in their infancy.The oldest digital files currently preserved date backless than half a century: a mere drop in the bucketfrom the standpoint of cultural record.

The challenges we face today are multiple: tolayer a diversity of representations on top of the stan-dard descriptors so as to better approach the fullsensorium – the weight, the texture, the feeling – ofcultural objects; to unjam data resources throughopen APIs (Application Programme Interface) andlinked data environments so as to give rise to virtualrealms of curation where researchers can work withopen collections data and stories can be told throughand with individual objects (excavated down to thenano scale) as well as with collection-sized aggre-gates. Every object is a collection. Every collectionis a social network of things. Objects and collections

have friends. It is time to mobilise them as well as to“describe” them through representations that attendto the acoustical and haptic (not just the ocular).

Every burial ground needs to be cared for con-tinuously if it is to endure.

culture resides and where human experience findsits home.

Integral to that task, but at the micro level, is theneed for a relational approach to the description ofobjects, which is to say, the need for a concept ofsearch that focuses upon the retrieval, not of indi-vidual items, but of the networks of interconnec-tions that run through them. For much of the historyof modern cultural institutions, the conventional actsof reduction of works to title, creator, date, snapshot,etc. were viable because the data were only visibleon the inside. Collections data served the needs ofinventory management and were the near-exclu-sive province of museum staff. But even as invento-ries have migrated out into public view on the WorldWide Web, modes of description and representa-tion remain much as they were in the pre-digital era:top-down, tethered to standardised schemes, basedupon atomised approaches to objects.

A third challenge has to do with fragility . Digital

materials may occupy little space and be readilyresizable, sharable, and reproducible; the metadata,data, and capta that swirl around them may allowfor new modes and scales of argument; the condi-tions of use and access that they enable may makeit possible for everyone from high schoolers to localhistorians to become archive builders and archival


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HGUN SHOTOW

CGUN SHOTAN IFGUN SHOTORGET?

LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN



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L’INTERNATIONALE ONLINE – LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN – 24

H[GUN SHOT]OW C[GUN SHOT]AN I F[GUN SHOT]ORGET? – LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN

The contribution by Lawrence Abu Hamdanis to be found here.

http://www.internationaleonline.org/research/decolonising_practices/53_h_gun_shot_ow_c_gun_shot_an_i_f_gun_shot_orgethttp://www.internationaleonline.org/research/decolonising_practices/53_h_gun_shot_ow_c_gun_shot_an_i_f_gun_shot_orget


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ANOTHER MAPPINGOF ART AND POLITICS.

THE ARCHIVE POLICIES OFRED CONCEPTUALISMOS

DEL SURANA LONGONI / RED CONCEPTUALISMOS DEL SUR



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L’INTERNATIONALE ONLINE – ANA LONGONI / RED CONCEPTUALISMOS DEL SUR – 26

ANOTHER MAPPING OF ART AND POLITICS – ANA LONGONI / RED CONCEPTUALISMOS DEL SUR

Red Conceptualismos del Sur (known as RedCSur orthe Southern Conceptualisms Network) ¹ is an inter-national platform of work, thought and collectivepositioning that currently has over fifty membersin different countries of Latin America, Canada andEurope. It was founded at the end of 2007 by a group ofresearchers and artists with concerns about the needto intervene politically against the processes neutral-ising the critical potential of a set of what we could callconceptual practices that took place in Latin Americafrom the 1960s onwards. Today, the network functionsin four nodes (Research, Archives, Publications andWeb), which enable us to operate in diverse formatsor spaces of collective work. The network has held sofar three plenary meetings (Brazil, 2007; Argentina,2008; and Chile, 2009) to discuss our Founding Manifesto, and outline our major working guidelines.Due to the difficulties of gathering so many people, wehave opted for virtual meetings (plenary once a year,and node meetings once a month) and the annualelection of delegates charged with the general coor-

dination of the Network. We have

also carried out several collective projects, such as acollective research project on art and politics in LatinAmerica in the 1980s called “Losing the Human Form”(including an itinerant exhibition in Madrid, Lima andBuenos Aires, and a “glossary” volume published inSpanish and English), among others.

RedCSur considers that, as is the case in otheremancipatory projects, the catalysing potential of theso-called “conceptual practices” was broken up bythe force of State violence and market logic. The dif-ferent attempts to reactivate this disruptive powerhave been interrupted by the continual overlap ofdiverse mechanisms: the inoculation of collectivememory from State systems; the defensive oblivionassimilated by civil society; the depoliticisation ofsubjectivities in restructuring neoliberal economies;the aestheticisation of counterculture, etc. More thanforty years on from the outbreak of dictatorships ina significant part of Latin America, the ensuing trau-matic effect still smothers intellectual life in our soci-eties and immunises the poetic-political potential ofthose experiences.1. See redcsur.net/

http://redcsur.net/founding-declaration/http://redcsur.net/founding-declaration/http://redcsur.net/http://redcsur.net/http://redcsur.net/founding-declaration/http://redcsur.net/founding-declaration/


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Archives which RedCSur is currently working on.

“R. Archivo de la Resistencia Visual” 1973-1989, Chile. (R. Archive

of Visual Resistance 1973-1989, Chile). Inventory, digitalization,

preservation (Project in progress).

“R. Archivo de la Resistencia Visual”

1973-1989, Chile. (R. Archive of Visual

Resistance 1973-1989, Chile). Courtesy:

Antonio Cadima (Tallersol), Havilio

Pérez (APJ), Cucho Márquez (APJ).


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their material conditions, are placed in a precariousposition, or are dispersed and cannot be consultedpublicly. We set out to defend their inalienable state –namely, their integrity and indivisibility – to generateconditions for their preservation and their availability

for consultation by all interested parties, in additionto fostering their local registration wherever expe-riences occur that are encompassed in the archiveby way of alliances with public institutions with anunflinching commitment to the same principles.

In association with diverse local and inter-national agents (universities, museums), theseprinciples have enabled us to set in motion theinstitutionalisation of diverse artists’ archives, forinstance those from the Uruguayan artist ClementePadín, the Chilean group CADA (Colectivo deAcciones de Arte / Art Action Collective), theArgentinian artist Juan Carlos Romero (which joinsdocumentary holdings from various other artists),the Argentinian artist Graciela Carnevale, the archive

“Memories of Resistance”, which brings togethera series of graphic art practices in opposition toGeneral Pinochet’s dictatorship, and the Paraguayanartist Cira Moscarda, to name a few.

This is the way in which we seek to generate andsupport initiatives for the establishment, preserva-tion and right to use document archives linked to

RedCSur stemmed from the will to contribute to thiscritical power. Our main objective, therefore, is to vin-dicate the presence of sensitive memory in thoseexperiences in order for them to become an antag-onistic force inside the framework of contemporary

cognitive capitalism.RedCSur is aware that museums, collectors

and public and private art institutions participatingin the international contemporary art system are inthe midst of a strong dispute over visibility, belong-ing, the management of such artistic and politicalexperiences and the accumulation of cultural heri-tage. Therefore, it is no mere coincidence that forsome years now we have been witnessing a generalprocess of institutionalisation and canonisation ofarchives, documents and other material and immate-rial remnants from these conceptual practices. Ouraim is to reconnect the aforementioned experiencesin order to reactivate their catalysing potential, and asa starting point in the need to influence this area soas to revert these and other neutralisation strategies.

Faced with the pressing need to critically influ-ence the current situation, RedCSur upholds an ethi-cal and political commitment to the revaluation ofall archives on critical artistic practices from LatinAmerica (placing particular stress on those from theperiod spanning the 1970s and 1980s), which, due to


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and also addressing the implementation of thoughtand creation in a context of cognitive capitalism.Therefore, RedCSur endeavours to undertake a crit-ical and active part in the geopolitical diagram ofglobal forces in the cultural economy.

— Producing the memory of experience. Tracing, join-ing, organising and reinterpreting the documentsproduced by the aforementioned experiences isnecessary but not enough, for these tasks by theirvery nature only enable access to formal outwardappearances and commonplace representations.To unblock their interrupted critical power, there isa need to confront their immaterial memory; there-fore, it is essential to recover the sensitive registerof the experience and the attachments that ariseas a direct form of intervention in neglect. Thisalso entails rehabilitating the disruptive force fromthe cultural context containing the conditions ofpossibility.

— Activation experiments. We want to generate actionstrategies that update the polluting and catalysingpower of these experiences, which involves mov-ing beyond their mere visibility, not solely becausethese practices are irreducible in their mere objec-tuality, but because we are more concerned withvividly connecting them to the present. We wantto create a new laboratory of experimentation with

the said experiences, and we aim to set in motion acircuit of Network Archives that share and facilitatepublic access to documents. We believe in the press-ing need for collective and decisive intervention toput a stop to the continual expropriation, dispersion

and destruction of documents and collections. Wefeel that the policies for forming archives must notonly be concurrent with an acknowledgement of theeffects of colonialism, but also with the persistenceof colonialism in Latin America.

We lay stress on – even more so in the currentpolitical climate across a number of the continent’scountries – the urgent need to generate State poli-cies and common efforts that are synchronised andcoordinated and strive to establish a network of pub-lic and decentralised archives.

These objectives of our archive policies cannotbe taken into consideration without interactions withother approaches in our work that are inseparablefrom one another:

— Research policies. We take research to be, aboveall else, a political and not merely an academicexercise. For us research is to restore, name andgenerate meaning around a set of poetic-politicalexperiences whose critical power has been nulli-fied. This means facing up to and taking charge ofthe tensions brought about by policies of neglect,


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Archivos en Uso platform www.archivoenuso.org

Juan Carlos Romero, Violencia (Violence), poster, 2000. Parte del

Archivo de Artistas Juan Carlos Romero (Part of the Archive of

Artists Juan Carlos Romero).

http://www.archivoenuso.org/http://www.archivoenuso.org/


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productions between 1965 and 2010), the archiveof creative practices from the human rights move-ment in Argentina since the last military dictatorship,the archive belonging to the Chilean group CADAand, finally, the archive of underground magazines

produced during the last dictatorship in Argentina(1976-1983). Numerous other archives are also beingprepared, and are all the outcome of lengthy researchprocesses.

Consequently, through its actions RedCSurseeks different possibilities in thinking, doing, posi-tioning, conceiving, exhibiting and politically histori-cising the disruptive force and the critical capacity ofthe artistic-political practices that have taken placein Latin America.

the ability to encompass publications, exhibitionprojects, public discussions and museum initia-tives. Regardless of the format, these interventionsendeavour to set up different notions of history,heritage and the transmission of knowledge and

duly questioned powers.

A key commitment for RedCSur is advocating the col-lectivisation of materials, and we look to devise col-lectivisation devices and to disseminate archivesthat flow beyond artistic realms. As a result, we havepromoted Archives in Use, an experiment that strivesto grant availability and public access to archivesfrom research projects set up by RedCSur, and thosethat are in collaboration with other platforms, forinstance the Study Group on Art, Culture and Politicsin Modern-day Argentina, from the Gino GermaniResearch Institute of the Faculty of Social Sciencesat the University of Buenos Aires. In addition to onlineconsultation, Archives in Use are also free of chargeand available either temporarily or permanently oncomputers in libraries, documentation centres, sitesof memory, exhibition spaces and education cen-tres by simply ordering through a contact email. Wehave already collectivised four document archivesin this format: the archive on the Argentinian art-ist and sociologist Roberto Jacoby (his divergent

http://archivosenuso.org/http://archivosenuso.org/


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DECOLONIAL

SENSIBILITIES:INDIGENOUS RESEARCH

AND ENGAGING WITH ARCHIVES IN

CONTEMPORARYCOLONIAL CANADACRYSTAL FRASER AND ZOE TODD



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L’INTERNATIONALE ONLINE – CRYSTAL FRASER AND ZOE TODD – 33

DECOLONIAL SENSIBILITIES – CRYSTAL FRASER AND ZOE TODD

During recent months, the idea of reconciliationhas been brought to the forefront of the Canadiansocio-political terrain, largely ensuing from effortsto examine the historical experiences of Indigenouspeoples in the Indian Residential Schools (IRS) sys-tem. This was a system that sought to eliminateIndigenous cultures, in part, by forcibly removingchildren from their families to obtain a state-basededucation, often far away from their homes to institu-tions characterised by substandard and abysmal liv-ing conditions. The shift to reconciliation and effortsto achieve a “nation-to-nation relationship” hasprompted a great deal of attention and new ques-tions of access, content, and ownership of historicaldocuments dealing with the history and legacies ofIRS. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)battled the federal government for access to filesand documents in possession of the Government ofCanada pertaining to the centuries-old history of IRSin Canada, illustrating some of the nuances and com-plexities inherent in the question of ‘decolonising thearchives’. For Indigenous peoples, access to state or

church archives is complicated, given ongoing set-tler-colonial realities that frame and govern archivesin Canada. To decolonise the archives requires anerasure or negation of the colonial realities of thearchives themselves. Given the inherent colonialrealities of the archives as institutions, any effort todecolonise or Indigenise the archives in Canada cantherefore only ever be partial.

In theorising the idea of ‘decolonising’ thearchives, we are faced with a number of structuralissues that must be unpacked and we do so in theCanadian context. In this short piece, we first ques-tion who controls these archives? Second, we exam-ine the archival holdings themselves, pointing to boththe absent within the holdings themselves and thegaps in our knowledge about archival holdings. A finalquestion asks: should we have the goal of ‘decolo-nising archives’? Acknowledging the inherent colo-nial paradigms that inform and shape the archivesas institutions, we propose moving away from thequestion of decolonising the archives themselvesand suggest instead applying a historically-informed


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access materials. Once documents are received, theyare often heavily redacted to the point of being use-less. Fraser’s own experience accessing recordsfrom Library and Archives Canada (LAC) for her doc-toral research on the history of IRS in the Canadian

Arctic was characterised by persisting roadblocks.Spanning over 2013 and 2014, an ATIP applicationwas lost (and re-submitted), heavily-redacted elec-tronic files were provided and rendered almost obso-lete, and the remainder of the requested collectionwas placed on hold, for review, in Ottawa. But upontravelling nearly 3,000 kilometres to access the col-lection, Fraser was informed that the files had beenchecked out by another researcher for an undeter-mined amount of time.

Due to the tenuous and highly sensitive natureof these documents, coupled with the fact that veryfew researchers have analysed documents reflect-ing this modern history, the boundaries imposedaround ‘sensitive’ research are troubling. To accessarchival materials in Canada is to move across geo-graphic, political, and even linguistic boundaries. It isto contend with the structures and rules that governeach organisation; researchers are forced to grapplewith power structures that trickle down from bureau-cracies to individuals that hold sway over the mate-rials, facilities, and accessibility. The new National

critical decolonial sensibility in our engagement withthe archives.

Who Controls

the Archives?In Canada, there are a variety of archives which con-tain information pertinent to Indigenous nations, peo-ples, and communities. Historical records are housedin a variety of locales: state archives (national, pro-vincial/ territorial, and municipal); church archives(curated and controlled by religious orders, such asthe Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the United Church ofCanada, the Anglican Church of Canada); universityarchives; Indigenous governance organisations; anda variety of corporate and private archives.

There are numerous ways that access to archivesand materials is restricted. The Access to Informationand Privacy (ATIP) Act regulates how individuals mayaccess archival holdings. Ironically, there are numer-ous claims that the implementation of privacy acts bygovernment agencies is in fact heavily restrictive. Inrecent years, the experiences of scholars, journalists,lawyers, and others filing ATIP (or provincial varia-tions) and Freedom of Information and Privacy (FOIP)Act, have been to wait for onerous periods of time to

CO O S S S C S S O O


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Centre for Truth and Reconciliation Archive housedat the University of Manitoba, which opened in late2015, is an adequate starting point for conversationsabout re-defining archival challenges and its politi-cal burdens, especially with its extensive online and

digitised records, but, in all its innovation, there arelimitations even to this collection.

In addition to restricting access to public docu-ments, there are questions about the ownership ofthese materials. In 2008, LAC announced a partner-ship with the corporate entity Ancestry.ca to digitiseLAC’s holdings. This move raises serious concernsabout the vulnerability of people’s information toexploitation by private interests, as well as questionsabout corporations charging citizens for access topublic documents. In a time when a) Indigenous peo-ples in Canada are defending land rights against theoperations of national and multi-national corpora-tions that seek to extract and profit from non-renew-able resources in unceded Indigenous territoriesand b) when Indigenous nations in Canada rely onaccess to archival materials to articulate court casesaffirming existing legal rights to their territoriesagainst large-scale resource extraction projects, thequestion of third-party corporate incursions intomanagement of sensitive personal and communityinformation is both pertinent and troubling.

Archival Holdings:The Unknown and Missing

A fundamental challenge lies in the fact that the

majority of archival documents in Canadian archiveshave been produced by non-Indigenous people:namely white men who dominated exploration, politi-cal and other ‘great men’ tropes of Canadian history.Inspired by the well-known and provocative articleby Gayatri Spivak, Canadian historians have ques-tioned if other less-known historical actors – such asIndigenous people, women, and children – are ableto “speak” in archival documents. Archival recordsproduced by Indigenous people prove to be far andfew between. We know very little about the lives ofIndigenous women, apart from a few celebratedheroines, such as Thanadelthur, Kateri Tekakwitha,and E. Pauline Johnson. Even less is known aboutIndigenous children, two-spirited individuals, andliminal figures such as medicine men and women.Further, the three constitutionally recognisedIndigenous groups in Canada (First Nations, Inuitand Métis) are not represented equally in Canadianarchives, owing to the different relationships andhistories between the Crown and each Indigenousgroup. For example, accessing materials pertaining

DECOLONIAL SENSIBILITIES CRYSTAL FRASER AND ZOE TODD


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View from Library and

Archives Canada, Ottawa,

October 2014. The pres-

ence of Indigenous people

persists, despite the

tenacity of the settler

state. Photo credit:

Crystal Fraser.

Library and Archives Canada, October 2014.

Photo credit: Crystal Fraser.



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to Métis histories at LAC is difficult, as these materi-als are held in a decentralised manner. If Indigenouspeople are present in historical records, they areoften depicted as passive bystanders, rarely freeagents in their own right and far removed from narra-

tives that highlight agency or sophistication.To their credit, some scholars have attempted to

uncover Indigenous voices through creative read-ing of state documents and by beginning with thepremise that, as historian Elizabeth Vibert explains,

“meaning, value, and knowledge itself [is] unstable,uncertain, and open to multiple understandings”.While poststructuralist approaches have recentlydominated historiographical analyses, scholarsstudying colonialism and post-colonialism in NorthAmerica have become increasingly invested in read-ing historical documents in creative ways that allowfor deep and fluid understandings of the past. Forexample, in her work, Todd strives to understandthe role that fish played in mediating relationshipsbetween Hudson’s Bay Company clerks, OblateMissionaries and Inuvialuit in the Paulatuuq region inthe 1920s-1950s. Reading the archives through thelens of Indigenous legal orders and sentient more-than-human agency brings a different perspective tothe role of animals like fish in shaping and respond-ing to colonial encounters in Arctic Canada. For the

most part, however, academics continue to be limitedby the overtly biased and one-sided nature of archi-val records.

The Question of Decolonisation:Transforming the Archives?

In light of these challenges, we wonder what‘decolonising the archives’ would look like? Is it aworthy goal for Indigenous peoples? To reclaim,reshape, and transform the archives to meet theneeds of Indigenous peoples requires an honestand blunt engagement with the bureaucratic andarcane structures that govern and shape researchtoday. Church, State, and Corporate archives mustbe acknowledged as enmeshed in the specificnation- and history-making endeavours they foment.Reconciling the needs and goals of a) Indigenouscommunities, nations, and b) Indigenous scholarsand c) others accessing and using the archives willrequire ongoing and nuanced conversations aboutthe broader relationships between the Canadianstate and Indigenous nations/societies. This neces-sitates responses that are far deeper than simplydigitising content or hiring Indigenous archivists.It also requires us to question how Indigenous



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There is no single approach in decolonising orIndigenising the archives. It will require nuanced,thoughtful, and contextual approaches that tend tospecific relationships, locations, histories and legal-political realities. Historian Adele Perry writes that

“Canadian Indigenous people have routinely pointed tothe disjunctures between the written and oral recordsof treaties and to the colonial state’s selective and self-serving interpretation of their meaning”. Indeed, oneway of bring greater diversity to archival spaces andfeature Indigenous voices is to prioritise and expandhistorical collections to include a greater number andrange of oral history, whether in the form of transcripts,

audio or video files, or previously published works.Overhauling archival spaces so they are more

attentive to Indigenous needs and desires requiresa nuanced approach that must be attentive to theplurality of Indigenous legal orders, nations, andtemporal and spatial experiences that characterisethe Canadian settler state. But the question remainswhether state, church, institutional, or privatearchives should be Indigenised or decolonised in thefirst place. We argue that rather than decolonise thearchives, the application of a decolonial sensibilityis necessary to attend to the complex relationshipsbetween archives, and Indigenous peoples. Makingarchives friendlier to Indigenous people and pursuits

peoples can meaningfully access, and hold account-able, the institutions running the nation’s archives.This engages several simultaneous and sometimescontradictory issues: the structure and function ofarchives remain bound to National imaginaries and

histories. Decolonisation of these structures andprocesses can only ever be partial.

Cultural historian Catherine Hall asserts that afundamental part of the project of decolonisationmust begin with a settler desire to understand cul-tural difference. She writes that we must “decolonizethe cultures through which those systems of repre-sentation were produced”. To achieve this, however,

settler Canadians – scholars included – must beeager to have transparent discussions around whiteprivilege, settler colonialism, and structural oppres-sion that characterise post-secondary institu-tions and Canadian society more generally. Throughembracing methodologies of discomfort, we mustengage in conversation that hinge upon the hardquestions: how we have benefitted and continue tobenefit from the dispossession of Indigenous peo-ple; how Indigenous communities continue to be theobjects of academic research with little consultationand few partnerships; and how we uphold structuresof oppression that privilege white supremacy overfair, just, and lawful relationships.



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— Hall, C. 2000, “Introduction: Thinking the Postcolonial,

Thinking the Empire”, in C. Hall (ed.), Cultures of

Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the

Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. A Reader, Routledge,

New York.

— Spivak, G.C. 1998, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in C. Nelson

and L. Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and Interpretation of

Culture, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, pp. 271-313.

— McCormack, P.A. 2009, “The Many Faces of Thanadelthur:

Documents, Stories, and Images”, in J.S.H. Brown

and E. Vibert, Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native

History, 2nd ed., University of Toronto Press, Toronto,

pp. 329-364.

— Miller, J.R. 1997, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native

Residential Schools, University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

— Milloy, J. 1999, A National Crime: The Canadian Government

and the Residential School System, 1879-1986, University

of Manitoba Press,Winnipeg.— Murray, J. 1994, “Métis Scrip Records”, Library

and Archives Canada, 26 August, viewed 2 February 2016.

— Perry, A. 2005, “The Colonial Archive on Trial: Possession,

Dispossession, and History in Delgamuukw v. British

Columbia, in A. Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts,

Fictions, and the Writing of History, Duke University Press,

Durham, N.C., pp. 325-350.

— Shoemaker, N. 2006, “Kateri Tekakwitha’s Tortuous Path

to Sainthood”, in M.E. Kelm and L. Townsend (eds.), In the

Days of Our Grandmothers: A Reader in Aboriginal Women’s

History in Canada, University of Toronto Press, Toronto,

pp. 93-116.

— Stoler, A.L. 2009, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic

Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton University

Press, Princeton, N.J.

— Vibert, E. 1997, Traders’ Tales: Narratives of Cultural

Encounters in the Columbia Plateau, 1807-1846, University

of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

is essential, but given the complex and sometimestroubling history of the Canadian nation state and itsdraconian and oppressive approach to and relation-ship with Indigenous peoples, it is essential that wecontinue to recognise archival spaces, especially

state archives, for their original intent: to createnational narratives that seek to legitimise the nationstate by excluding Indigenous voices, bodies, econo-mies, histories, and socio-political structures.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

— Alexander, K. 2012, “Can the Girl Guide Speak? The Perils

and Pleasures of Looking for Children’s Voices in Archival

Research”, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol.4,no. 1, pp. 132-145.

— Brown, J.S.H. and Vibert, E. 2009, “Introduction”, in

Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History, 2nd ed.,

University of Toronto Press, Toronto, pp. XI-XXXII.

— Brownlee, R.J. 2003, A Fatherly Eye: Indian Agents,

Government Power, and Aboriginal Resistance in Ontario,

1918-1939, Oxford University Press, Don Mills, O.N.

— Carleton, S., Fraser, C. and Milloy J. 2015, “Assessing

the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation”,

Blog Post, ActiveHistory.ca, 26 November.

— Carter, S. and McCormack, P.A. 2011, Recollecting:

Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and

Borderlands, Athabasca University Press, Edmonton, A.B.

— Gerson, C. and Strong-Boag, V. 2005, “Championing

the Native: E. Pauline Johnson Rejects the Squaw”,

in K. Pickles and M. Rutherdale (eds.), Contact Zones:

Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past,

UBC Press, Vancouver, pp. 47-66.


http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/metis/metis-scrip-records/Pages/introduction.aspxhttp://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/metis/metis-scrip-records/Pages/introduction.aspx


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RESOURCES — L INTERNATIONALE BOOKS

IN SEARCH FOR

QUEER ANCESTORSKAROL RADZISZEWSKI

IN SEARCH FOR QUEER ANCESTORS – KAROL RADZISZEWSKI



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L’INTERNATIONALE ONLINE – KAROL RADZISZEWSKI – 41

IN SEARCH FOR QUEER ANCESTORS KAROL RADZISZEWSKI

In a private apartment in Warsaw in 2005, I openedmy solo exhibition titled Fags, which was my artisticcoming-out and, at the same time, the first openlyhomosexual exhibition in Poland. Of course, some gaythemes had appeared in the works of other Polishartists before, but never in such a direct and conspic-uous manner. In the same year, I began publishing anirregularly-issued DIK Fagazine. It is the first, and so

far the only, art magazine from Central and EasternEurope devoted entirely to the subject of masculin-ity and homosexuality in the broad context of cultureand art, with particular focus on the region. For a longtime, in Poland, as well as in many other post-socialistStates, homosexuality remained taboo after the polit-ical transformation; and it was often treated as some-thing that “had arrived from the West”. For example,in Ukraine, which is trying to acquire European Unionmembership, it is not unusual to hear argumentsagainst this accession saying that as a result thecountry would turn into a “Sodom”. This argumentis largely present in the region, especially in thosecountries still under strong influence of the Roman

Catholic or Orthodox Church. On the opposite end ofthe spectrum, Warsaw hosted “Europride” in 2010.This could be perceived as an element of a “rain-bow colonisation”, in which “Western gays” broughttheir rainbow flag to Eastern Europe, while a confer-ence accompanying the event was devoted to so-called “pink money” – the purchasing power of theexclusive gay community. As a result, I concluded that

there was a serious need to prove that queer cultureexisted in Poland already during the socialist era, thatwe were “queer before gay”. Consequently, my goalhas been to recover this aspect of the past as part ofPoland’s cultural history in general, not just as an ele-ment of queer history.

DIK Fagazine

The beginning of my archival research was con-nected with DIK Fagazine. The magazine graduallyevolved from a periodical addressing the current situ-ation in Poland and the Central and Eastern Europeanregion, to a platform exploring queer archives that is



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Karol Radziszewski,

Kisieland, installa-

tion view, Centre of

Contemporary Art Znaki

Czasu in Torun, 2014.

Photo: Wojciech Olech.

Courtesy of the artist

and CoCA in Torun.

DIK Fagazine, Issue

No. 8 “BEFORE ‘89”, 2011.

Courtesy of the Queer

Archives Institute.

Karol Radziszewski,

vitrine (Filo, 1986-1990

and DIK Fagazine, 2005-

2014 magazines). Photo:

Wojciech Olech. Courtesy

of the artist and CoCA in

Torun.



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determined to discover our “queer ancestors”. In 2008,I began work on an almost three-year-long projectthat was a special issue entirely focusing on the lifeof homosexuals in Central and Eastern Europe before1989. In the process of researching sources and trav-

elling, I reached many people whom I interviewed.From the outset, it was important for me to confrontthe Polish experience with that of our neighbours, tosketch a wider panorama of the region. With my col-laborators Paul Dunca, Kamil Julian, Pawel Kubara andJaanus Samma, I looked at several selected countries(Poland, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Serbia, the CzechRepublic and Hungary) in order to trace and compare

cruising areas, gay nude beaches, groundbreakingpublications as well as reactions to the beginningsof the AIDS epidemic. Despite specific local circum-stances in these countries, many of the describedexperiences proved to be similar, such as a lack of anorganised community (with a few exceptions), simi-lar cruising areas (almost always railway or bus sta-tion toilets, main city parks, and men’s bathhouses),non-existent or very few places addressed exclu-sively to homosexual clients (clubs or bars), and theemergence of the first publications on the authorities’actions in the effort to prevent the spread of HIV-AIDS.

My primary method was conducting inter-views with older people and consulting their private

archives (photographs, personal writings) which hadusually never been shared before. My work rarelyinvolves visits to libraries; I prefer to focus on directcontact with the witnesses to events and gather theirmemories. Typically, I would first meet local activ-

ists, who would give me information about people Icould potentially talk to, and they often suggestednew avenues where I could find further material. Thusobtained and recorded audio or video interviewsbecome documents, and the beginnings of an archive.

Alternative Sexual History

as an Art PracticeThanks to work on the issue entitled “BEFORE ‘89”(published in 2011), I met Ryszard Kisiel and discov-ered the existence of Filo – the first socialist-era gaymagazine devoted to non-heteronormative issues inthis part of Europe, founded by Kisiel and distributedsemi-legally among his friends and acquaintances ¹.Consequently, DIK Fagazine reprinted original mock-ups from Filo, our “newly-discovered ancestor”.During consecutive meetings with Kisiel in his tinyflat in Gdańsk, I was able to explore his vast archives,and learn new facts and variousaspects of his activity. On one

1. Filo was published

between 1986 and 1990.



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S C O QU C S O S O S S

occasion, he produced a plasticbag full of meticulously labelledlittle boxes with a collection of

nearly 300 coloured slides. These contained docu-mentation of the photo shoots which Kisiel realised

with his friends in someone’s private apartment. Theslides dated from late 1985 and early 1986, as a directresponse to Operation Hyacinth (a comprehensivecampaign carried out by the Civic Militia in the PolishPeople’s Republic, which consisted in the gatheringof data on Polish gay men and their community, as aresult of which approximately 11 000 personal fileswere registered). The discovered slides provide spe-

cific visual evidence and contradict the stereotypi-cal way of thinking about life in the Polish People’sRepublic. They counter the image of a homosexualas a persecuted victim, revealing a large potentialof positive energy, uninhibited sexuality, invention,irony and self-irony (even towards such taboo top-ics as AIDS). Kisiel’s archive also allows us to take afresh look at the reality of the socialist era, becausedespite obvious contradictions between the East andthe West in that period, strikingly cosmopolitan refer-ences and similarities can be noticed in the interna-tional “sexual avant-garde” and its iconography ².

For the last few years, I have been working onan art project titled “Kisieland” which is a long-term

undertaking drawing on Kisiel’sarchive. It began with record-ing conversations and orderingthe digitisation of Kisiel’s slides,which have since been presented

at lectures and in printed formas part of several exhibitions ³. Apublication presenting the entirecollection is planned in the future.In 2011, I invited Ryszard Kisielto my studio, where he decidedto return to the role of creatorafter twenty-five years. The film

(Kisieland, 2012, 30min) which recorded this actionconfronts memories with Kisiel’s present image, ashe confronts a young model face-to-face. In addi-tion to telling the story, the documentary presents alarge number of digitised archival photographs. The

“AIDS” cycle (wallpaper, paintings, graphics, andposters) of this project echoes Ryszard Kisiel’s col-lage of Donald Duck stickers included in an issueof Filo in the late 1980s as well as the “Imagevirus”project by the collective General Idea, which trav-estied Robert Indiana’s iconic work called LOVE. Aspart of the Kisieland project, I organised a specialevent during PERFORMA 13 in New York – a discus-sion to which I invited both Ryszard Kisiel and Avram

2. For more detail about

this point, see article

by Tomasz Basiuk (2011).

3. Exhibitions include:

Rosa Arbeit auf gold-

ender Strasse, xhibit

Gallery, Vienna, 2012;

8th Photography Biennial,

Poznan, 2013; PERFORMA

13, New York, 2013;The Prince and Queens.

The Body as an Archive,

Center of Contemporary

Art Znaki Czasu, Torun,

2014; Tomorrow will be

different, Fotograf

Gallery, Prague, 2015;

Travestis, ZPAF Gallery,

Krakow, 2015.



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Ryszard Kisiel, Bulgaria, 80’s.

Courtesy of the Queer Archives Institute.

Ryszard Kisiel, 1985/1986.




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Finkelstein (the founding member of Gran Fury andACT UP, the AIDS advocacy group), thus confrontingEastern European and American narratives on thebeginnings of the AIDS epidemic. The meeting alsoincluded a performative reading of excerpts from

Boris L. Davidovich’s Serbian Diaries, which describethat moment in history from the perspective of early1980s Belgrade.

Locating Kisiel’s archive in the context of art isan opportunity to restore/reveal the past, and recoverits critical potential. It is also complements Polishvisual history by supplying it with hitherto ignoredmaterial.

Broadening perspectives –Queer Archives Institute

My work with archives has expanded from the initialhighly local, Polish, context, to the gradual inclusion ofneighbouring countries in search for commonalities,and the current attempt to reach a broader perspec-tive. Travelling to Brazil and exploring the questionof Brazilian queer archives, I found some similari-ties with the results of my research conducted so far.The particularly topical subject of the “Global South”repeatedly overlaps, criss-crosses and dovetails with

the “Global East”. What emergesis a story of a “global province”,timidly trying to discover its ownlanguage and create its own inde-pendent identities. There have

been previous projects comparingEastern Europe with Latin America,for example the recent exhibi-tion Transmissions: Art in EasternEurope and Latin America, 1960–1980 at the Museumof Modern Art in New York in 2015, that focused onparallels and connections among artists. However,so far I have not come across any similar attempt to

assemble queer archives in a specific given context.Such juxtapositions seem to me to be an interestingexperiment. What I concentrate on is rather a similarcontext, certain limitations, as well as often a vesti-gial character of (hi)stories that are yet to be told.

It is to subject matter of this kind that I wouldlike to dedicate my newest project, “Queer ArchivesInstitute” (QAI) ⁴. On one hand, it is intended to sumup my practice so far, and, on the other, to try andestablish permanent co-operation with partners(such as artists, activists, academics, and localnon-governmental organisations). The aim of theproject will be to gather queer archives from vari-ous geographic regions, especially those which

4. The Queer Archives

Institute was estab-

lished on 15 November

2015, that is to say on

the thirtieth anniversary

of Operation Hyacinth

in Poland. Its officialinauguration will be the

exhibition I am preparing

for Videobrasil in São

Paulo in April 2016.



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are “peripheral”, either literally orsymbolically colonised, and makethem accessible as well as sub-ject to artistic interpretation.

QAI’s main platform will be

a website ⁵ gathering digitisedmaterials ranging from scans ofarchival photographs, magazinesand publications, through audioand video interviews, to texts ana-lysing related concepts and meth-odologies. Owing to the entirelyprivate character of the initiative,

at first, by necessity, the scale ofthe undertaking will be limited;however, eventually it is meant tobe more far-reaching.

Importantly, in addition to theprocess of cataloguing and geo-graphical/ chronological order-ing, I will create a system to enablethematic searches which will form

multi-level hypertextual connections between mate-rials from geographically distant places. Thus the dig-ital dimension of QAI needs be complemented by a

“material” one: by organising or co-organising exhibi-tions presenting the collected materials, sometimes

with the participation of invited artists. On a smallerscale, I have already started to use such strategies invarious presentations ⁶ where archival visual mate-rials, such as voyeuristic photographs from very dif-ferent beaches, are juxtaposed side by side. Similarly,

I have showcased the first LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay,Bisexual, Trans and Queer) publications to be issuedin various countries, or artefacts (posters, leaflets,graphics, books) related to the beginning of theAIDS epidemic.

Parallel With

the Global CanonIn the post-socialist states particularly, or other con-texts marked by dictatorships for example, wheresome historical threads were broken or could neveremerge, there has been an attempt to build newnational narratives. Recent history is being largelyconstructed today, and sometimes manipulated. I aminterested in this appendicising, rewriting, revising,but from a very personal perspective. Decolonisinghistory through queer archives has become for mea mission, an “identity project”. The work has politi-cal, or even activist potential for me. I often feel thatby working on every next project, text or exhibition,

5. Hopefully, the first

documents and texts will

soon appear on queer-

archivesinstitute.org.

Of course, all this

assumes a very long-term

perspective, in principleopen to a multithreaded

development. For this

reason, at present it is

difficult to precisely

define the outline and

structure of the ini-

tiative. One thing is

certain, however: it will

evolve.

6. In 2015, I presented

a paper during a con-ference titled “Sex and

Sexuality in East-Central

Europe, Past and Present”

at the Central European

University, Budapest,

Hungary, and a lecture

during one of the events

at the Queer Forum Sofia,

Bulgaria.


http://queerarchivesinstitute.org/http://queerarchivesinstitute.org/http://queerarchivesinstitute.org/http://queerarchivesinstitute.org/


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Mockups of the Filo magazine, 80’s.


Archival images and the first issue of Hlas magazine (1931)

reproduced in the DIK Fagazine No. 9 “Czechoslovakia” issue (2014).




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REFERENCES

— Basiuk, T. 2011, “Notes on Karol Radziszewski’s Kisieland”/

“Uwagi na temat projektu Kisieland Karola Radziszewskiego”,

in K. Pijarski (ed.), The Archive as a Project, Fundacja

Archeologia Fotografii, Warsaw.

— Davidovich, B.L. 1996, Serbian Diaries, Heretic Books,

London.

— DIK Fagazine: founded in Poland in 2005 by Karol

Radziszewski, viewed 1 February 2016, www.karolradzisze-

wski.com and www.dikfagazine.com.

I can do more than by marchingand demonstrating in the streets.I am interested in alternative ver-sions of well-known stories andquestioning canonical narratives.

This subversive strategy aims tochange the future image of the

hitherto-created reality. This is connected with dis-covering the local Eastern-European identity, shapedin parallel with the global canon: the first Czech mag-azine dedicated to homosexuality was publishedin 1931 ⁷, so why should we always have to rely pri-marily on American or British zines from the 1960s

and 1970s?

— Translated from Polish by Ewa Kowal

7. Hlas sexuální menšiny

(Voice of the Sexual

Minority) was published

fortnightly between April

1931 and April 1932. It

was followed by Nový hlas

(New Voice) published

until 1934.


http://www.karolradziszewski.com/index.php%3F/projects/dik-fagazine/http://www.karolradziszewski.com/index.php%3F/projects/dik-fagazine/http://www.dikfagazine.com/http://www.dikfagazine.com/http://www.karolradziszewski.com/index.php%3F/projects/dik-fagazine/http://www.karolradziszewski.com/index.php%3F/projects/dik-fagazine/


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THE HUMPOF COLONIALISM,

OR THE ARCHIVE AS A SITE

OF RESISTANCERONA SELA

THE HUMP OF COLONIALISM, OR THE ARCHIVE AS A SITE OF RESISTANCE – RONA SELA



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L’INTERNATIONALE ONLINE – RONA SELA – 51

In the following article, I focus on contemporary artis-tic and research practices which challenge archivesin colonial countries and zones of conflict. It contin-ues my research on colonial archives, their charac-ters and histories and concentrates on contemporaryworks by Israeli and Palestinian artists and research-ers which re-read official colonial Israeli archives, orarchives with colonial features. I will demonstrate

that the use of these colonial archives enables us towork against their original objectives, “against theirgrains” as defined by Ann Stoler (2002, p. 99), trans-forming them into sites of resistance.

Zionist colonialism in the land of Israel/Palestinebegan in the late nineteenth century and developedin various stages. In 1948 the Nakba launched theethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population, the

prevention of their return to their lands and homes,the occupation and Judaisation of Palestinian vil-lages, towns and neighbourhoods. Subsequently, theMilitary Government (whi