Abstract:
As an ongoing artist-research practice, I create "anarchives" for the Anthropocene. These exist in an active mode of anti-accumulation and anti-preservation, offering a temporality that does not conform to commodification and spectacle. Traditional archives function as repositories of culture and knowledge—their very existence rests on prioritizing static, inert dead matter. They are “deeply linked to colonial power, control, hegemony, and conquest” (Derrida, 1996). Their emphasis on concretizing a specific past across timescales means that they reject the possibility of morphologies as entries. They struggle with ephemeral objects, subjective histories, and unfixed shapes, unfixed boundaries (Jack Burnham, 1968). The practice of ‘anarchiving’—anarchy archiving—is to create and engage with objects that reject the hegemony of traditional archives. They engage with the type of liminal figures depicted by Donna Haraway’s string figures in Staying with the Trouble. In my work, this especially includes objects engaging the chemical senses of taste and smell. Plants can wither, or are presented as perfumes; dinners are eaten, or food rots. The premise is to implicate our bodies in the archives and break down the barriers between nature and culture through embodied, sensory multi-media experiences (the same barriers explicitly broken down by the premise of the Anthropocene).
Areas of STS Scholarship: Method and Practice, Food and Agriculture, Environmental/Multispecies Studies
