19 May 2023
Living Archives: Some Formations
In this ‘Living Archives’ Forum, we sieve through anecdotes and fragments, or the ephemerality of the performative gesture, that seek to become visible in and as the archive. We dwell on how the archive itself is a sensorium as much as a place for holding traces of what is public and what place the private has in participating in public memories. We show how new archives of home and displacement can be/are being generated, how new citizen archives, archives of performances, restagings, memories and emotions are emerging. We want our readers to think along, as we reflect on a larger shared question: if art is read as archive, what is gained and what is lost via this transformation, and for whom? We highlight here four key possibilities around reading the living archive as embodied forms and ephemeral forms that are sensorial, performative, pneumonic; and as practices and after/lives that span conversations, collections, curations as well as discourse, histories and historiographies.
Embodied and Ephemeral
Archives are captured in embodied forms – within and via bodies, as well as in performances and materials that are prone to ephemerality and erosion. As the ethnomusicologist and scholar of performance studies Lorena Alvarado writes in her intervention, ‘The Place where Records are Kept: Singing Voice as Archive’, via songs sung by her immigrant mother, the body remembers and stores records as a place – not a destination but ‘itself a flesh and bone phenomena that inhabits and haunts spaces real and imagined, an ear that has perceived, a hand that recalls’. A remembered and performed song becomes a ‘sonic artefact’ and can lead to habitual reflexes that the body houses, curates, inhabits, becoming thus a corporeal repository and an affective archive. Yet the body can be regarded as a tenuous archive, fragile and forgetful, as much as it is a space of deep embedding. The fragile containment, of appearing and disappearing, is what is particular to the affective archives of performances – not the notes and structures of songs, but the emotive registers that animate (via singing and listening to) songs. Historian Radha Kapuria asks in her intervention, ‘Ephemeral Embodiments: The Materiality of Music and Dance in Colonial Punjab’, if the elusive traces of the aural and the performative constitutes its own ‘embodied’ archive? While historical traces of musical performances appear in the archive as written records and engravings, the sensorial embodiments of reception and performance itself requires what Kapuria calls an ‘intermedial’ reading that can capture livingness. In art historian Aditi Chandra’s intervention ‘Monuments as Body Archives’, the historical, public monument is in itself a body archive, one that is a sedimented repository not only via its own materiality (tangibility) but also through habitation, access, memories, spatial transformations and resistance (intangibility). She reflects on how knowledge can be formed through embodied traces and accessed through physical states and actions of those that inhabit monuments.
Excess and Marginalia
Documentary filmmaker Yehuda Sharim’s intervention, ‘The Unfilmed: Repositories of Divinity from the Edges of America’, is an exploration of ‘the abundance of moments and sentiments’ that reside in recorded and unrecorded scenes from his documentary about an immigrant Iranian family, Songs that Never End (2019). The essay is a journey into unfilmed excesses, margins and marginalia, as Sharim argues, that ‘… reclaiming unrecorded voices force us to reimagine archives as open and broken terrains that are always in flux, incomplete, and wild’. Archives, therefore, are acts of shifting lenses, where fragments, displacements and violence itself can be given place – in alterative narratives, imaginaries and framing. Artistic narrations are ways into these alternative placements – ones that can reposition the eyes of power and the bodies of the oppressed, and give form to what is in excess, or incomplete. In art historian Kaitlin Emmanuel’s intervention, ‘Debt and Death in the Archive: Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan’s Drawers of War Transactions (2019)’, fragmentation itself is a protagonist in the archive. The artistic installation (in this case at the 2019 Sharjah Biennale) re/stages objects, testimonies and memories from the Sri Lankan civil war to foreground, as narrative, what fragmented the archive in the first place, giving form – as an aesthetic archive – to incompleteness itself. Excess and marginalia become constitutive sites when we rethink what comprises the livingness of language itself – one that gains life not only in speech but in mutations. An experimental conversation staged by the literary scholar Ananya Jahanara Kabir, ‘Activating Pondicherry Creole: Conversation as Method’, presents us with hidden traces, mis-readings, mishearing and mistranslation that make language – in this case, a creole language – seek new arts of listening, connecting and enacting. A living archive is also a sensorium, with inherent aesthetic possibilities, that demands new methods and registers for capturing and collecting as much as translating into art/historical discourse.
Archives as After/lives
How can absences be relived, reframed or returned in art/historical narratives? And what inter-disciplinary tools do we need to write art histories when we work with absence and contradictions? Anthropologist Dipti Sherchan’s essay ‘Living-in-Archives: Traces, Fragments and Anecdotes on Shilu Pyari’ discusses how traces, fragments and anecdotal narratives shape the archival corpus in the context of marginalised spaces. For Sherchan, the geography of her research – Nepal – is one such marginalised sphere within the art historical study of South Asia. Through archival encounters she shows that the women artists she studies are doubly inscribed with invisibility. Archives of art from such marginalities are quite unlike the institutional archives – and theorisations therefrom – that dominate an overtly Euro-American narrative of archive theory. Anecdotal archives carry an ‘unbearable lightness and ephemerality’ that shape the contours of what can be re-collected and written. Absence of institutional or consolidated collections – often the hallmark of art histories in and from the Global South – is both an impediment, and an invitation, to rethink what can constitute an archive, and how art as archive can reconstitute familiar histories. Art historian Sanjukta Sunderason, in her intervention ‘Freedom by Other Means: Art as Archives of Decolonisation’, highlights how art needs to be given new historical agencies, and thereby a livingness that can be approached from plural vantage points, and via contradictions of assimilation and alienation, to reconfigure received histories of decolonisation in the twentieth century. This project becomes all the more urgent in our times where unfinished conversations of freedom – whether via Black Lives Matter or calls for decolonising institutions, epistemes and pedagogies – are becoming ever more pressing. A living archive, even in dispersion or incompleteness, demands this dialogue between the past and the present. Anthropologist Lotte Hoek’s intervention, ‘Contemporary Art and the Living Film Archive in Bangladesh’ reveals the ways in which contemporary artists and art enthusiasts in Bangladesh rework and re-inhabit a dispersed built inheritance by reinscribing sites along material and genealogical lines. They do so by participating in shared, public enactments – whether in art projects or the contemporary film society movement where the past becomes a living resource for myriad forms of contemporary becoming of cultural voices and productions.
Archives in Practice
Practitioners of (alternative forms of) archiving have been alert to the pressures of ephemeral forms, incomplete, disappearing voices and remoteness of stories that need to be revived via untagged fragments found in collections. Rahaab Allana’s intervention, ‘The Archive as Proposition’, speaks from the Alkazi Collection, but also initiatives like PIX. These spaces, Allana notes, investigate ‘spaces and counter-spaces “from which” or counter “to which” an alternative archive may arise’ that focuses on repair and renewal and which can exceed the limits of what more traditional (institutional) archives can contain. In Guneeta Singh Bhalla’s intervention, ‘The 1947 Partition Archive: A Living, Evolving, Crowdsourced Archive on India’s 1947 Partition’, we encounter the exhaustive work done by the 1947 Partition Archive in collecting oral testimonies and documenting a significant yet much-silenced moment in history through crowdsourcing techniques that exploit modern communications technologies. These techniques enable the representation of voices from diverse ethnic, religious and economic communities in the South Asian region and diasporas but also reveal the infrastructural anxiety of the digital archive.
Conclusion
In this collection, we are interested in thinking through what the living archive can mean in material, epistemological and methodological terms. Most of us are drawing from our expertise in South Asian, Oceanic, migrational and refugee contexts. We hope that the striking entry-points we seek to activate will find resonance among a broader range of specialists and practitioners, as we investigate what potential materialities (forms, sites, bodies, collectives, curations, documentations, and absences, etc) living archives can take, and how such formations can generate new lives and legitimacies for varied pasts in order to envision just and equitable futures. The larger goal of our interventions in this forum is methodological. Living archives, as we show here, need to be read as praxis; a hinge through which to parse open new cohabited spaces of art, histories and anthropological methodologies, and decentre hegemonic narratives of what is archive. Our interventions here thus aim to generate new ways through which the interactions of histories, art, material sites, articulations and even absences can be configured. We foreground organic, embodied, palimpsestic forms and analysis, through crowdsourcing, activist curations, experimental and performative forms of knowledge-making, contextualised mapping and theorisation of networks of discourse, transmission, dialogues or dissonances.
Aditi Chandra teaches art history at the University of California, Merced and specialises in the Islamic world, with a focus on South Asia. Her research shows how, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, physical transformations and subaltern actors disrupting statist narratives rendered the monument unruly even as the State attempted to order it. Her book Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. She is co-editor (with Vinita Chandra) of Nations and its Margins: Re-thinking Community (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019). She has curated exhibitions showcasing colonial visual travel ephemera.
Sanjukta Sunderason is the author of Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2020) and co-editor (with Lotte Hoek) of Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks, and Connected Histories (Bloomsbury, 2021). She teaches art history at the University of Amsterdam.