PUBLIC 57: Archive/Counter-Archives by PUBLIC Journal: Art Culture Ideas

ARCHIVE/COUNTER-ARCHIVES

EDITED BY

MAY CHEW, SUSAN LORD, AND JANINE MARCHESSAULT

ARCHIVE/ COUNTER-ARCHIVES EDITED BY

MAY CHEW, SUSAN LORD, and JANINE MARCHESSAULT

S U P P O RT E D B Y T H E A G NE S E THE RI NG TO N ART CEN T RE

CONTENTS 5

INTRODUCTION May Chew, Susan Lord, and Janine Marchessault I. THEORIZING

TWENTY THESES ON THE ANARCHIVE Adam Siegel

NEITHER/NOR: Other Cinema as an Archives and an Anti-Archives Brett Kashmere

ANARCHIVAL IMPULSES: A Performance Theory of Media Alanna Thain

AWAKENING FROM THE GENDERED ARCHIVE: Archiveology and Critical Cultural History Catherine Russell II. INVISIBILITIES

DISRUPTING THE REGISTER: TreatyCard.ca and Indigenous Counter-Archives Danielle Taschereau Mamers

TRACES OF A REVOLUTION: In Search of the Palestinian Film Archive Hend F. Alawadhi

HIP HOP ARCHIVES OR AN ARCHIVE OF HIP HOP?: A Remix Impulse Mark V. Campbell

I, MABEL HAMPTON: Political Power and the Archive Steph Schem Rogerson

SEARCHING FOR BLACK VOICES IN CANADA’S ARCHIVES: The Invisibility of a “Visible” Minority Cheryl Thompson

COMMEMORATION AND DECOLONIZATION IN THE MISSING AND MURDERED INDIGENOUS WOMEN DATABASE Shawna Ferris, Kiera L. Ladner, Danielle Allard, and Micheline Hughes

107 TRADE CATALOGUE OF EVERYTHING Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens with the support of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre

III. MATERIALITIES 128 FUGITIVES: Anarchival Materiality in Archives Kate Hennessy and Trudi Lynn Smith 145 TEMPLATING LIFE: DNA as Nature’s Hard Drive Mél Hogan 154 CONSIDERING TODD’S TAPE: The Textual Transition of Videotape Miscellany Jennifer VanderBurgh 163 ICE AS A COUNTER-ARCHIVE: Permafrost, Archival Melt, and Climate Futures Sabrina Perić 171 TOWARDS A FILM MYCOLOGY?: Biodeteriorated Archival Images of Havana as Incurable-Images of the Cinematic City Juan Carlos Rodríguez

IV. DOING ARCHIVES 184 “ABSENTEE INFORMATION”: Lucy R. Lippard’s MoMA Library Intervention—From Decision to Stance Adam Lauder

262 EXCAVATION, COUNTER-ARCHIVE, AND SPATIOTEMPORAL ENCOUNTER: Past is Not Post and Rewriting Histories Benj Gerdes and Lasse Lau

199 HORIZONTAL MENTORSHIP: A Preservation Solution for Marginalized and Underrepresented Audio-Visual Works Mary Kidd and Marie Lascu

270 PRAIRIE HISTORY REDUX Blair Fornwald and Barbara Meneley

ART REVIEWS 208 EFFICACY AND ARCHIVAL PRACTICE IN NUNATSIAVUT: A Case Study of the Rigolet Inuktut Living Archives Mark David Turner 217 MAKING PANCAKES: Intergenerational Cooking and Remediating the Archive Alejandra Bronfman, Maia Dawson, and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda 228 ACTIVATING HISTORY: The Living Counter-Archive of Urban Vernacular Paths Benjamine P. F. Prus 236 THE NiS+TS PSYCHOGEOGRAPHER’S TABLE: Countering the Official Halifax Explosion Archive Mary Elizabeth Luka and Brian Lilley 250 IMMERSIVE INSTALLATION AS COUNTER-ARCHIVE IN CHERYL SIM’S YMX: MIGRATION, LAND, AND LOSS AFTER MIRABEL Danica Evering

276 Libby Oliver, Soft Shells K. Hart 279 The Sunshine Eaters Liz Ikiriko 282 Leonard Cohen: Une Brèche en Toute Chose/A Crack in Everything Treva Michelle Legassie

BOOK REVIEWS 285 Photography and the Optical Unconscious Shawn Michelle Smith and Sharon Sliwinski, eds Amy Luo 287 Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers Stephen Graham Joshua Synenko

290 Contributors

IN ORDER TO MOVE FORWARD, every project requires the construction of a framework or outline. These frames orient our position, narrow our focus, and assist us in determining what we need to look at and explore while allowing us to determine what can be purposefully ignored. The process of ignoring is less obvious but just as influential as what we choose to include. This is a constant process in archival work whether as archivist or researcher. The decisions to include, explore, preserve, organize, or display items and information influences our perception of these artifacts. We count on our frames to guide us, help us to see what isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t there. But our frames are made up by us and include our biases as well as our concepts of the nature of reality and truth. This piece plays with these concepts by creating a space that is both real and imagined. That includes artifacts from other spaces, eras, and sources to create a reality that is real only within this frame. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Marnie Parrell on Sage (2018)

MAY CHEW, SUSAN LORD, and JANINE MARCHESSAULT

INTRODUCTION

THIS ISSUE OF PUBLIC advances understandings of the precarious conditions of, and new transformative opportunities surrounding, audio and visual heritage in the twenty-first century. The contributors in this issue include artists, archivists, and researchers who interrogate hegemonic forms of control over public history and community action, but they are also invested in the creation of counter-archival practices and modes of access. The title of the issue, “Archive/Counter-Archives,” is a political statement referencing how many national archives have been shaped by ideological narratives about history as a white European settler colony.1 The broader project within which this issue is situated is strategic—it seeks to broaden more orthodox mainstream histories to highlight marginal voices in the creation and safeguarding of documentary heritage, particularly in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, HIV/AIDS activism, and the ongoing struggles against entrenched forms of racial and gendered violence. The articles and artists’ projects included here reflect the reality that cultural heritage has been unevenly cared for, especially in the chronically underfunded smaller archives that have historically preserved the creative practices of women and Indigenous, racialized, and LGBT2Q+ communities. Within Canada, all sectors of archives have been impacted by decades of austerity cuts,2 but nowhere is this felt more keenly than with analogue moving image and audiovisual (AV) archives, which require specialized knowledge and care.3 Unlike most industrialized nations, Canada lacks basic policies of AV preservation and use at all government levels, which inhibits public and scholarly access to moving image heritage. Meanwhile, digital media—thought to be ubiquitous and accessible —are even more vulnerable, with most born-digital works becoming lost after ten years.4 One of the six key responsibilities of Canadian citizenship is “protection of Canada’s natural, cultural and architectural heritage.”5 Library and Archives Canada’s recent “Canadian National Heritage Digitization Strategy”6 foregrounds the urgent need to create a knowledge network of memory institutions to collaborate and share resources, and to produce innovative approaches to cultural preservation protocols in order to chart the course for the digital century. Many contributors to this issue of Public offer interventions into the mainstream national archival stories. Other contributions address different national, local, and community-based contexts. Archive/Counter-Archives is divided into four sections. I. TH EORIZI NG takes theory into a process-oriented register informed by diverse examples and case studies. All of the essays in this first section demonstrate how the anarchive produces new articulations of the archive. Adam Siegel provides a context for understanding the anarchive alongside the archive, giving us some of its many radical characteristics in twenty pithy thesis statements. For example: “Rather than ‘provenance,’ which assumes a point of origin which may assert a right of property upon the record, let us speak of

‘milieu,’ where property rights are void.” Brett Kashmere uses the term “archives” rather than “archive” precisely as milieu. Informed by Rick Prelinger’s recognition of the linguistic tension between archives as places, and the archive as theoretical construct, Kashmere’s essay focuses on Craig Baldwin’s Other Cinema, which he sees as both an archives and an anti-archives, and helps to develop a vocabulary for new approaches to archival research. Following this, Alanna Thain offers readers a special focus on the anarchive’s potential to transform bodies and generate new worlds. Situating the “ambiguous liveliness of moving image media” in the “bullet image” from the popular film The Matrix (Lana and Lily Wachowski, 1999) and other American action movies, Thain examines three recent queer and feminist videos and dance performances to discern how they harvest the “deranged force” of such images to create an anarchive of gestures and radical reconfigurations. Catherine Russell similarly sees the potential for feminist awakenings in archival images of classical Hollywood. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Russell sees the shock value of certain archival images (which Benjamin described as forms of awakening) to be of tremendous value. She takes Rania Stephan’s The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2011) as a superlative example of how “images of women” can awaken from their narrative homes in the dismantling and reassembling of cinematic archives. The next section, II. INVISIBILITIES , focuses on the robust yet previously unconsidered, neglected, or invisibilized AV archives produced by marginalized communities. Media makers who turn their lenses and microphones toward these archives often simultaneously expose the colonial, racist, and patriarchal structures that define which histories are deemed worthy of preservation. In the first essay, Danielle Taschereau Mamers examines the Indian Register as the essential technology of documentation in settler colonial law, one that simultaneously eradicates Indigenous peoples and histories while making these communities visible only as subjects of the state. Taschereau Mamers puts forth artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s TreatyCard.ca project as a creative intervention of colonial state authority that subverts the Register’s technologies of discernibility. Investigating the legacy of the Palestinian Film Unit, Hend F. Alawadhi probes the manner in which archives create images of revolution. Alawadhi significantly complicates how these visual repertoires can effect real social change, particularly through feminist and dialogic interventions. Mark V. Campbell’s article examines how the institutional cooptation of hip hop history allows institutions to, in a Foucauldian sense, produce and manage cultural discourse. Campbell considers not only how processes of archivization that help preserve hip hop’s radical aesthetics and politics might be possible, but also how hip hop’s formal interventions might potentially influence archivization. Focusing on Mabel Hampton, an early African-American lesbian activist whose archives are held at Brooklyn’s Lesbian Herstory Archive, Steph Schem Rogerson examines how queer, racialized histories might be recuperated from institutionalized archivization and the latter’s regulation of social bodies. In the next article, Cheryl Thompson takes aim at the difficulties of recovering black voices and lives within Canadian archives. Here, Thompson’s own frustrations with conducting archival research serves to illuminate broader dilemmas around the lack of institutional support and knowledge of black Canadian history, and the resulting elisions and invisibilities written into colonial archives. Focusing on the digital activist archive, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Database (MMIWD), Shawna Ferris,

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Kiera L. Ladner, Danielle Allard, and Micheline Hughes argue for the ways that archival tools can be used to reframe and challenge colonial narratives entrenched in mainstream news narratives. Their article considers how to develop collections that can actually be meaningful resources for activists and families of the 1200+ missing and murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people in Canada. Also included here is the contribution by Richard Ibhgy and Marilou Lemmens that derives from their installation, The Golden USB. Following in the footsteps of the Pioneer Plaque (1972-1973) and The Golden Record (1977), The Trade Catalogue of Everything is premised on interstellar trade and presents an exhaustive inventory of all “products” of nature, human culture, and industry that is a critique of planetary capitalism. Our desires to create technologically innovative archives bring additional issues and problems to the fore, as older technologies and means of documentation become not just obsolete but vulnerable to material degradation as a consequence of time, environment, and handling. These vulnerable materialities take specific forms at the community level, in regional economies and geographies, and across platforms. III. MATERIALITIES presents questions regarding the agency of the non-human inhabitants of archives. In the first essay, Kate Hennessy and Trudi Lynn Smith turn attention away from the archival practice of halting entropy in favour of the “generative force of entropy in the archive” where vinegar and magenta are followed and documented for their lively insights into the structures of archival systems and structures. Mél Hogan provocatively explores the arguments for synthetic DNA as a redress for the environmental impacts and the instabilities of current dominant digital archival practices. The materiality of the living archive raises numerous ethical concerns for Hogan: one of which is, “rather than externalizing our lives onto records, we could embody those records. But, whose bodies would be tasked with carrying memory?” The timelessness of DNA in Hogan’s essay is followed by the temporality of VHS recordings in Jennifer VanderBurgh’s exploration of how collections of VCR television recordings yielded an archival category and conundrum of the miscellaneous tape, filled with unstable and vulnerable ephemera. VanderBurgh nonetheless argues for the phenomena like Todd’s personal tape of 1980s TV as an archive of regional and national context. In Sabrina Perić’s essay, the history of the geo-political materialities of petroculture is understood as producing a particular space and time, where “permafrost as a climatic archive” is also a planetary counter-archive. From the circumpolar conditions of archival materialities, this section concludes with an investigation of particular tropical economy. Juan Carlos Rodríguez interrogates the particular power of archival curation that produces the “incurable image” alongside the relatively lucrative discourses of ruinology associated with Havana, thinking of microbes that not only invade the physical city made with prefabricated materials but also devour the cinematic city— that urban-scape made with moving images. The contributors in the final section, IV. DOING ARCHIVES , engage with archives as an artistic, living medium. This section highlights how archives can be remediated through situated creative practice, with artists activating silences, articulating the politics of metadata, and producing affective counter-archival links to diasporic, sexual, gendered, racialized, and indigenized histories. Here, older questions concerning who builds archives, and for what purposes, reflect on the agency of the actual communities who are “doing” and keeping archives as well as how the medium, location

of preservation, and methodologies of re-use, re-interpretation, and revival are constitutive of the living archive. Inherently tied to embodied performance and cultural practices, living archives proliferate within their own communities and are reanimated through situated cultural and memory materials such that they are, as Dylan Robinson notes, without need of museological “life support.”7 Adam Lauder examines the critical energies behind “Absentee Information,” Lucy R. Lippard’s discipline-defying contribution to INFORMATION, MoMA’s 1970 exhibition catalogue. As Lauder argues, Lippard’s “archive game” uncovered the invisible labours carried out by mostly women librarians and archivists, and in doing so, challenged institutional hierarchies. Mary Kidd and Marie Lascu provide a manifesto of sorts in their overview of the New York-based XFR Collective, who have provided best practices, transfer facilities, and archival solutions to a variety of marginalized communities. They argue that the best response to the AV preservation crisis is “horizontal mentorship” and grass roots knowledge transfer. Mark David Turner describes archive ecology through a case study of a language archives project to protect the Inuktitut dialect in the community of Rigolet, Labrador. Turner is most interested in the ways in which archives are tied to living practices as a critical imperative towards successful preservation. Echoing this imperative of the living archive is the project “Making Pancakes,” a collaboration between Alejandra Bronfman, Maia Dawson, and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, based on a handwritten family cookbook that belonged to three generations of women in Aceves Sepúlveda’s family. Here, the written and oral, memory and history intersect through the intergenerational act of making pancakes—of living the archive. Next in this section is Benjamin Prus’s contemplation on urban paths as a form of peripatetic inscription, created through repeated use. This piece considers the city itself as archive and walking as an embodied act of archiving vernacular histories. Following this, Mary Elizabeth Luka and Brian Lilley document a multi-site, multi-year iterative project presented by the interdisciplinary research-creation group, Narratives in Space + Time Society (NiS+TS) as a counter-archive of the 1917 Halifax Explosion. The project centres on mobile media—embodied practices of walking, storytelling, and engagement with material “debris” to explore new sitelines of the city’s traumatic historical event. Mobile media also confronts the elision of racialized and economic classes within colonial heritage discourses. Reflecting on artist Cheryl Sim’s YMX: Migration, Land, and Loss after Mirabel, co-curator Danica Evering explores how the installation engages the Montreal-Mirabel International Airport as a living archival topography that allows audiences to corporeally traverse themes of terrestrial belonging, dispossession, and forced migration. Benj Gerdes and Lasse Lau focus on two recent exhibits curated by the authors, which featured artists working with archival investigations and historical memory. Here, the authors weigh the potentials and risks of turning to archives and history as avenues of protest and political resistance. In this section’s final contribution, artist Barbara Meneley and curator Blair Fornwald present their accounts of “Prairie History Redux,” a collaboration conceived around the question of how contemporary publics can engage with archives, and their entangled strata of Indigenous and settler narratives, through embodied translations and counter histories. For Michel Foucault, the archive is not a totalizing account of a culture but rather an invisible and controlling structure that organizes social values and systems of knowledge. This structure is what allows for the appearance of certain things and the absence of others. Thus, archives are not

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static, transparent, value-neutral things filled with unchanging information, but rather are sites of struggle shaped by dominant ideologies.8 The idea of the “counter-archive” grows out of recent research on the history of community archives, which have in many instances grown out of the counter-cultural activist movements of the 1960s.9 It is this counter-cultural energy that many contributors engage in through community-based and artist-run archives, affirming what Canadian archivist Terry Cook referred to as the new archival “community paradigm.”10 Such a paradigm shift was due in part to the “computerized world,” which ushered in new DIY methodologies of participatory and collaborative archival work.11 Even if early photography and moving images challenged the stability of the archive, creating the de facto “counter-archive” as Paula Amad argues,12 the “archival turn” of the 1990s is marked by the rise of ephemeral counter-archival and anarchival practices that bring heterogeneity—different media and materials—into archives along with new performance tactics.13 In both the LGBT2Q+ and feminist communities, archives emerge from collaborative processes that mirror the network and non-profit mode of collective feminist organizing,14 along with noninstitutional performative approaches to safekeeping history because archival institutions have historically overlooked their value. Counter-archives are “an incomplete and unstable repository, an entity to be contested and expanded through clandestine acts, a space of impermanence and play,” while in practice the counter-archive “entails mischief and imagination, challenging the record of official history.”15 Counter-archives can be political, ingenious, resistant, and community-based. They are embodied differently and have explicit intention to historicize differently, to disrupt conventional national narratives, and to write difference into public accounts. Dylan Robinson has explained how Indigenous archives require counter-archival methods that use the tools of research-creation to create twenty-first century Indigenous approaches to archives.16 Understanding the archive as medium and as relational practice, contributors locate new solidarities in these diverse approaches to history, archives, and their activation. Cultural property rights, memory curation, and technological transfer/digital migration together form one of the most complex and important societal challenges of the twenty-first century.17 In seeking to redress the dearth of scholarly research on the changing nature and political realities of audio-visual archives, this issue of Public does not so much answer the question, “what is an archive?”, as help to lay out some of the scaffolding needed to situate the diverse and complex practices of archiving. NOTES 1 Adele Perry, “The Colonial Archive on Trial: Possession, Dispossession, and History in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia,” in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Antoinette Burton (Duke University Press, Durham, N.C., 2005), 325-350; Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009). 2 Michele L. Wozny, “National Audiovisual Preservation Initiatives and the Independent Media Arts in Canada,” Archivaria 67 (2009): 87-113; Jean Gagnon, “Treasures that Sleep: Film Archives in the Digital Era,” in The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization

and Preservation 2012 Conference Proceedings, ed. Luciana Duranti and Elizabeth Shaffer (UNESCO, 2013), 892-895. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, for example, recently announced their destruction of masses of AV archives. See Terry Pedwell, “CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized,” The Star, April 19, 2018, https://www.thestar.com/entertainment /2018/04/19/cbc-is-destroying-its-broadcast-archivesafter-theyre-digitized.html. Nicola Mazzanti, ed., Digital Agenda for the European Film Heritage: Challenges of the Digital Era for Film Heritage. Executive Summary of a Study prepared for

16 17

the European Commission, DG Information Society and Media (Luxembourg: European Union, 2011). Government of Canada, “Citizenship Regulations SOR/93-246,” Article 15(2)(b), http://laws-lois.justice. gc.ca/eng/regulations/SOR-93-246/FullText.html (accessed 1 June 2018). Library and Archives Canada, “Building a Canadian National Heritage Digitization Strategy,” http://www.bac -lac.gc.ca/eng/about-us/Pages/national-heritagedigitization-strategy.aspx (accessed 1 June 2018). Dylan Robinson, “Public Writing, Sovereign Reading: Indigenous Language Art in Public Space,” Art Journal 76.2 (2017): 85-99. Michel Foucault, “The Historical a Priori and the Archive” (1969), in The Archive, ed. Charles Merewether (London and Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 26-30. Andrew Flinn, “Archival Activism: Independent and Community-led Archives, Radical Public History and the Heritage Professions,” Interactions 7.2 (2011): https://escholarship.org/content/qt9pt2490x/qt9pt 2490x.pdf. Terry Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms,” Archival Science 13.2–3 (2013): 95–120. Terry Cook, “Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts,” Archival Science 1.1 (2001): 3–24. Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Kate Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013); Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Cait McKinney, “Newsletter Networks in the Feminist History and Archives Movement,” Feminist Theory 16.3 (2015): 309-28, doi:10.1177/1464700115604135. Brett Kashmere, “Introduction to Issue #2: CounterArchive: Cache Rules Everything Around Me,” Incite Journal of Experimental Media and Radical Aesthetics 2 (2010): http://www.incite-online.net/intro2.html. Robinson 2017. Darren Jorgensen and Ian McLean, eds. Indigenous Archives: The Making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Art (Crawley, AU: UWA Publishing, 2017).

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PUBLIC 57 ARCHIVE/COUNTER-ARCHIVES Edited by May Chew, Susan Lord, and Janine Marchessault

ARCHIVE/COUNTER-ARCHIVES advances conversations regarding the changing nature and political realities of audio and visual heritage in the twenty-first century. Bringing together artists, archivists, and researchers, this issue of PUBLIC argues that the re-thinking of audio-visual heritage preservation is ultimately strategic and political, especially given the precarious material conditions of archives in the digital era, and the fact that colonial and racialized forms of structural control over the history of place and belonging continue to embargo access to the past for many communities. This issue thus turns towards the transformative potential of counter-archives, which can be political, ingenious, resistant, and community-based. These insurgent archives are embodied differently and have explicit intention to historicize differently, to disrupt conventional national narratives, and to write difference into public accounts. PUBLIC 57 also brings to the fore the work of women and Indigenous, racialized, diasporic, and LGBT2Q+ communities to create counter-archives that expand, interrogate, and disrupt conventional archives and archival methodologies.

CONTRIBUTORS Hend F. Alawadhi Alejandra Bronfman, Maia Dawson, and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda Mark V. Campbell Danica Evering Shawna Ferris, Kiera L. Ladner, Danielle Allard, and Micheline Hughes Blair Fornwald and Barbara Meneley Benj Gerdes and Lasse Lau Kate Hennessy and Trudi Lynn Smith Mél Hogan Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens Brett Kashmere Mary Kidd and Marie Lascu Adam Lauder Mary Elizabeth Luka and Brian Lilley Sabrina Perić Benjamin P. F. Prus Juan Carlos Rodríguez Steph Schem Rogerson Catherine Russell Adam Siegel Danielle Taschereau Mamers Alanna Thain Cheryl Thompson Mark David Turner Jennifer VanderBurgh EXHIBITION REVIEWS K. Hart Liz Ikiriko Treva Michelle Legassie

www.publicjournal.ca BOOK REVIEWS Amy Luo Joshua Synenko

Cdn/US $20 UK £15