Knowledge/Culture/Ecologies KCE 2017 Paper Presentation
Knowledge/Culture/Ecologies KCE 2017
Universidad Diego Portales
Santiago Chile November 15-18 2017
On November 15, MCL Artist in Residence Trudi Smith presented “Anarchival Materiality: Proximal interactions” at The Knowledge/Culture/Ecologies KCE 2017 conference at Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago Chile November 15-18 2017. The paper considered our (Trudi and Kate’s) recent research into fugitive archives, fleshing out relationships between the materiality of things and their human caregivers as a way to provide understanding of uncertainty and precarity as vital – even productively destructive— forces in more than human archives.
The paper was part of a session that Trudi organized with Krista Caballero (Acting Director of Design Cultures & Creativity program at University of Maryland, College Park). Krista presented her artwork, Birding the Future, and we were were joined by artist Karina Aguilera Skvirsky (LaFayette College) and American Studies scholar Melanie Armstrong (Western State Colorado University). The session emerged from our shared involvement in Mapping Meaning, a collective who gather biennially around experimental knowledge practices.
Our interdisciplinary session, “Speculative ecologies, intimacies and migrations in the archive” brought together artists and social scientists to address way to recognize and advocate for transdisciplinary and interspecies futures within the ecologies of human made archives. We asked how are archives interspecies families, microbial intimacies, more-than-human encounters, and practices of care? Our presentations re-imagined the archive and explored how to generate new modes of acting in the face of ecological crisis
Video stills, ‘Residue: Proximal Interactions” by Trudi Lynn Smith and Kate Hennessy, 2017.