The very idea of a living archive contradicts [the] fantasy of completeness. As work is produced one is contributing to and extending the limits of that to which one is contributing. It cannot be complete because our present practice immediately adds to it, and our new interpretations inflect it differently.
– Stuart Hall, ‘Constituting an Archive’ (2001)
Drawing from exhibitions, artists and creative practices that have operated outside institutionalised archives, ‘Methodologies for a Living Archive’ asserts the archive as an ever-evolving conversation between histories; especially those marginalised, imagined, intentionally impermanent or forgotten. From ephemeral print media to philosophies of orality, this reading list focuses on how and why the ‘living archive’ is a crucial yet sidelined approach. With these readings we hope to cultivate a dynamic toolkit for practicing these methodologies and to foreground the archive as a practice of ongoing knowledge-sharing rather than the production of static history.
What is the ‘archive’?
- Stuart Hall, ‘Constituting an Archive’
- bell hooks, ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness’
In ‘Constituting an Archive’, Stuart Hall proposes a methodology of archiving that expands with ongoing dialogues and perspectives; and in ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness’, bell hooks imagines ways for the margin to be used as a space of resistance. Pairing these two key texts as a foundation for this reading list asserts a toolkit for expanding and practicing Hall’s and hooks’s propositions in reframing the tradition of the ‘archive’.
The living archive is defined by the very nature of being undefined. It is an ‘ongoing, never-completed project’ – it contradicts what Hall terms the ‘fantasy of completeness’ that is associated with the institutional archive. Instead, it approaches the archive as a conversation between histories, reflecting ongoing shifts in dialogue, identities and cultures, rather than a ‘locked’ repository of the past. This perspective has been instrumental in redefining how the Black and Asian diaspora is represented in institutional archives, particularly in the creation of archives of visual artists working within these diasporas. (The Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva) in London houses the Stuart Hall Library, for instance, which operates as research centre and repository for diaspora art histories.)
bell hooks’s affirmation of the margin as a site of political possibility highlights the need for methodologies that deviate and resist the ‘centre’. Classification systems, operating as tools of domination, construct categories of race, class, gender and sexuality, and establish binaries of ‘centre’ (those who benefit) and ‘margin’ (those who are oppressed and/or excluded). Hall also notes that the diaspora is often also understood in binary terms, founded on exclusionary constructions of an ‘original’ and a ‘copy’, rather than positionality or relationality; archives, like diasporas, ‘always stand in an active, dialogic, relation to the questions which the present puts to the past; and the present always puts its questions differently from one generation to another’. In other words, archives do not arise out of thin air. Archives can be constructed, authored, fabricated and manipulated. Yet above all, archives are subject to change.
Towards this purpose, hooks proposes ‘radical openness’ as a safe place for those in the margin to develop methodologies and communities of resistance. She invites us to move beyond the binary of the ‘other’ to critique power and imagine alternative ways of knowing and living:
I am waiting for them (theorists) to stop talking about the ‘other’, to stop even describing how important it is to be able to speak about differences. It is not just important what we speak about, but how and why we speak. Often this speech about the ‘other’ is also a mask, an oppressive talk hiding gaps, absences, that space where our words would be if we were speaking, if there was silence, if were there. This ‘we’ is that us in the margins, that ‘we’ who inhabit a marginal space that is not a side of domination but a place of resistance. Enter that space.
Print-as-practice
Print-as-practice leads us back to traditions of radical self-documentation, knowledge dissemination, mutual aid and political subversion. Accessible, immediate and often ephemeral, printed matter possesses unique capacities; as Andrej Kilmowski observes in Posters from Paddington Print Workshop, print can ‘stir the mind and force the viewer to think, to take up a position, to ask questions.’ Whether self-published or collectively produced, print functions as both medium and methodology wherein the social, political, cultural and economic conditions of a community can be represented, contested and shared.
Sheila Liming frames how print-as-practice can be used to subvert and oppose structural conditions. Liming emphasizes the tradition of zine-making as a process: between consumption and production, ‘zines have always been invested in engineering producer/consumer communities meant to disrupt, and disable, that structure.’ Especially within the contemporary digital sphere, this ‘structure’ has produced an ‘increasingly fragmented public sphere’; zine-making can insert an alternate perspective into the mainstream and potentially unify the increasingly isolated population. Radical and subversive by nature, the simple act of print-as-practice produces a sense of the past, present, and future. Operating outside the traditional methodologies of archiving, zines (and related print material) produce necessary documentation of those who operate from and for the margins.
Riot grrrl emerged in the 1990s, drawing on the traditions of punk and using print media to self-represent and cultivate feminist, queer, resistant communities. The manifesto published in BIKINI KILL ZINE in 1991 asserts its early motivations, such as: ‘BECAUSE viewing our work as being connected to our girlfriends-politics-real lives in essence if we are gonna figure out how what we are doing impacts, reflects, perpetuates, or DISRUPTS the status quo.’ In her essay, Mimi Thi Nguyen investigates the existing historiography of riot grrrl, attempting to reshape the ‘then’ and ‘now’ of the movement and explore its relation to current matters. The publication was created with the intention of semi-secrecy and direct-to-community knowledge dissemination. While exhibiting the abilities of print-as-practice, Nguyen also foregrounds race as a significant tension within the movement, particularly examining how Riot grrrl’s predominantly white culture marginalized women of colors’ experiences.
The logic of orality
In Western thought and academia, the archive often exists as a fixed construct, inherently tethered to written and scriptural production. Senegalese philosopher Mamoussé Diagne’s seminal theory of orality and dramatisation makes a crucial contribution to the concept of the living archive, rethinking Western conceptions of ‘history’ through the ‘logic of orality’ that Diagne asserts is central to African thought. Diagne disrupts the notion that the archive is fixed to the temporality of the written word and subsequently fossilised in institutions. For Diagne, dramatisation disentangles this process, whereby performance produces knowledge among civilisations of orality.
Sengalese artist and writer Youssoupha Féhé Sarr builds on Diagne’s concept of dramatisation, applying this method to the archive of contemporary art. For Sarr, an archive based on written logic serves to domesticate time. By embracing oral reason, the archive approaches time not in a fixed sense but works to foster a relationship with time that cultivates an archive based on circularity. By rejecting rigid temporalities, Sarr brings into focus an archive that is not marked by institutional, language, or class barriers. As he writes: ‘Other kinds of relationships to time exist, and therefore to the archive and to the practice of archiving itself.’
Collectivity and non-ownership
Our approach to the living archive centres practice-based method of preservation rather than material repositories of history. Here, we focus on anti-proprietary practices on Levantine land, specifically in northern Lebanon and Palestine, where agrarian practices are evidence of a living archive while land and culture are under threat.
Lebanese artist Marwa Arsanios invites us to consider what land could look like if it were not property, but a collectively managed site of non-ownership. For Arsanios, a proprietary relationship with the land is marked by extraction. Mashaa’, a Levantine practice of communal land tenure during the Ottoman period in Lebanon, dismantles the system of ownership and instead centres usership, a non-extractive, mutually beneficial relationship with land. Alongside her filmic exploration of non-property, Arsanios proposes turning a site in northern Lebanon into a Mashaa’, where local communities who do not own land but live around the site can actively and collectively aid its restoration. Arsanios’ approach encourages us to consider non-property and collective practice as a genuine possibility for the visual arts. By expanding our preconceptions of what constitutes the collective, Mashaa’ urges us to consider the land as a living archive. When we engage with the land through Arsanios’ suggestion of non-ownership, perhaps we can reframe our own relationship to the archive as one of rehabilitation and collectivity rather than preservation and ownership.
Also based in the Levant, located in Ein Qiniya, near Ramallah, Palestine, Sakiya is a ‘progressive academy’ for knowledge-sharing that uses community-based Palestinian agricultural and ecological practice as ‘research’. Sakiya emerged after artists Nida Sinnokrot and Sahar Qawasmi were entrusted with the historic site in Ein Qiniya, with the hope of restoring the natural site amidst the physical, ecological and cultural destruction and displacement caused by illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and across Ramallah. Land-based knowledge, as evident in Mashaa’, is based on communal and ancestral uses of land: use is paramount and ownership is secondary. The preservation of Palestinian culture and land – while increasingly under threat – is central to Sakiya’s work, which is presented in exhibitions and symposia as well as education and community projects in Ein Qiniya. Where a tangible archive appears impossible to create amidst destruction, Sakiya redefines how Palestinian people and culture can, and will, exist in the archive.
Unarchivability
In an attempt to escape the tangible and traceable, artists worldwide in the twentieth century created event-based work. Unrepeatable and resisting archivability, these artists made their congregation the medium. In 1959 Allan Kaprow unveiled 18 Happenings in 6 Parts in New York’s East Village, at the pioneering experimental art space Reuben Gallery. A cross between theatre and contemporary art form, Kaprow divided three rooms into six parts with plastic sheeting and wood bars. Across the six parts, eighteen actions ranged from squeezing an orange to two performers reciting nonsensical words repeatedly. Inscribed on the invitation, Kaprow described the work as a ‘present event’.
Art historian Kirk Varndoe describes trying to preserve a happening as ‘trying to catch wind in a butterfly net’. Akin to John Cage’s theory of indeterminacy, the work, sequences, spatial construction, and score could never be repeated – an ephemerality that evades the archive’s attempts to encapsulate, document or reproduce the work. In this sense Michael Kirby’s anthology – which traces fourteen early happenings through their full scripts (typically more poetic and non-linear than instructional) – effectively attempts the impossible, in trying to archive the ‘unarchivable’.
The APTART collective in 1980s Moscow deviated from the USSR’s system of ‘official art’ reinforced through state policy, exhibition spaces and award associations. APTART’s ‘unofficial art’ was displayed in apartments and outdoors, in an artist-to-artist self-institutionalisation that made their congregation the primary medium. In a paradoxical sense, APTART may be said to have realised Maxim Gorky’s aesthetic programme more fully than the socialist realist movement that it engendered – in giving a truthful presentation of the contradictory conditions of life in the late Soviet era. APTART continuously defined itself by what it was not – in their first-ever ‘press release’, Natalia Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov proposed the notion of ‘anti-show’ – and the archive of this group may consist less in the material works than in the occasions on which the collective communed, whether documented or not. The living archive of APTART relies on the accounts and active participation of its members, rather than on the material traces of its activities.
The Chiang Mai Social Installation took form through a series of art festivals through the 1990s. All durational and based on social participation, the CMSI festivals resisted Western approaches to contemporary art and its histories through their DIY and ephemeral nature. In this essay, Simon Soon charts the genesis of CMSI from two of its founders, Mit Jai Inn and Uthit Atimana, and their intention to organize the festival as a varying and unarchivable tradition within Chiang Mai’s social fabric. The festival embodied Buddhist tenets of impermanence, prompting Soon to question Western art-historical methodologies for works crafted to be intentionally ephemeral.
Potential Realities
Who decides what constitutes the archive? Can fiction and fabulation become trusted authors of history? Drawing from artistic practices of world-building, fiction and fabulation, this section plays between metaphor and reality to interrogate who has historically been trusted to construct the ‘archive’.
Drawing on the artist’s personal experience during the Lebanese Civil War, Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad combines what we would consider ‘archival’ material – his own photographs of Beirut, shrapnel he collected as a child, his father’s calendar from the 1970s – with memories and people who may have never existed. By creating fictional authors and imagining their experiences, Raad questions how and why history validates and invalidates certain memories, and which stories enter the archive of ‘history’.
Elisa Adami invites us to consider how the museum acts as ‘paratext’, mediating the reception of art as such and questioning the museological practices that dominate the contextualisation of ‘Arab art’ outside of the ‘Arab world’. Focussing on Raad’s 2013 work Preface to the Third Edition – which addresses the proliferation of Western-style museums across the Gulf States – the article explores how the artist questions the relationship between art and reality, and how institutions dictate our engagement with the ‘facts’ of the archive. Through fiction, Raad creates an institutional architecture attentive to what is often omitted and imagines an archive unfettered by the Western constraints of the institution.
Also working with the manipulation of the traditional archive to imagine potential histories, British-Ghanaian artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah creates a living archive authored by the natural world. Akomfrah’s video-based bricolage creates a working archive for displaced histories of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in the United Kingdom, notably of the Windrush generation. The sea is a constant in his work, evoking displaced people, histories and memories, and bearing witness to the atrocities of Western imperialism and its ongoing legacy. By cutting and re-ordering ‘official’ ecological and documentary footage – from such sources as National Geographic and the BBC – Akomfrah’s archive consists of absences, breaks and ruptures. Resisting narrativisation, Akomfrah’s works are presented as multi-channel, where temporalities and geographies are blurred, out-of-place tableaux are injected into linear narratives; as such, the artist creates a new time and place altogether.
Across Akomfrah’s practice, migration is halted in a state of ‘never really arriving, even when one is “there”. Diaspora exists as a crossroads, where diasporic lives are “characterised by the absence of monuments that attest to [their] existence”’. Akomfrah’s 2013 documentary The Stuart Hall Project pays homage to Hall’s theory and legacy while tracing a migratory history of Britain. Yet across the filmmaker’s practice, and specifically in The Nine Muses, we see the natural world as an author of collective history. By putting geographies and histories in a speculative dialogue, Akomfrah’s practice embodies Hall’s philosophy of the living archive – a conversation between histories, remembered and forgotten, located in an unsettled crossroads between the two.