UCL Material, Visual and Digital Culture Seminar Presentation: “Being Anarchival”

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Feb 9

On Feb. 9th, Kate Hennessy presented an invited guest lecture in the University College London Department of Anthropology’s Material, Visual and Digital Culture Seminar.

Becoming Anarchival

Abstract

In this lecture I share examples of art-led ethnographic work in fugitive museum and archival collections as the art collective Pairatext, with Dr. Trudi Lynn Smith. Grounded in an interest in practicing an anthropology of the multimodal, we foreground the material dimension of anthropological research and describe image-making technologies and their use in anthropology as ideologically and materially situated. We theorize what we call anarchival materiality as a force of entropy in archives and collections, raising questions about the persistence and reliability of the products of contemporary multimodal practices in anthropology. Where the archival is the imagined truth and stability of museums, collections, and geographies, the anarchival is the unpredictable, the impermanent, and the speculative.

Emerging from our fieldwork around a defunded paleontology research centre in the northern Canadian town, Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia’s most recently established municipality, our 2024 exhibition Becoming Anarchival used documentary photographs, anthotype contact prints, and video works to foreground the anarchival as a condition that erodes widely held belief in archives, scientific knowledge, and civic structures as stable and enduring. We explore relationships between media and mining practices, settler-colonial exploitation, and their entanglements in paleontology and archives. The works highlight the fugitive materiality of collections and the image-making technologies used to document them, amplified in our current climate crisis fuelled by the extraction of petrochemical dinosaurs archived in the earth. Fossils, what Hiroshi Sugimoto has called “the first photographs”, are a way into an understanding of the entangled politics, mediality, and practices of becoming anarchival.