led by Dr Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic
Archives are often misconstrued as privileged repositories of ‘verified’ historical knowledge. This workshop approaches the idea of the archive as a site of ongoing colonial violence and anguish of ancestors and their descendants who seek redressive justice. The workshop will historicise archives as discriminatory taxonomies and systems of classification of people and expansive, encyclopaedic spaces of hoarding documents, photographs, artefacts and even human remains. At the same time, archives operationalise silences and redaction to ‘disappear’ some people and repress history that researchers such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ann Stoler, Michael Taussig, and Saidiya Hartman investigate through negative methodologies that necessitate critical fabulation when recorded historical evidence is absent or ephemeral.
This workshop will clarify the above notions and consider how museums, galleries, and universities curate and exhibit their colonial acquisitions and ethnological collections. We will also discuss alternative archives that use 3D imaging, storyworlding, and architectural technologies to rethink conventional archives and bring to the surface marginalised and concealed histories.
No prior knowledge is needed to attend the workshop. However, the participants will be asked to engage with two required readings. The workshop will be grounded in small-group and broader discussions, facilitated by watching a very short ethnographic film. A more theoretical conversation will be consolidated in an interactive practical activity that involves a cartographic and conceptual re-design of the topography of transatlantic slavery.