Gallery 881, Exhibition, Nov. 2-30 2024

Becoming Anarchival is a collaboration between artist-ethnographers Trudi Lynn Smith and Kate Hennessy that activates instability and impermanence as generative forces in museums and archives. Over the past decade, they have oriented their writing and art practice toward the anarchival, both as transformative disruption and as a methodology for engaging time-based media and the material politics of place. Where the archival is the imagined truth and stability of museums, collections, and geographies, the anarchival is the unpredictable, the impermanent, and the speculative. The anarchival signals new instances of becoming.

Emerging from their fieldwork around a defunded paleontology research centre in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia’s most recently established municipality (built around the Quintette metallurgical coal mine), the exhibition uses 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. Hennessy and Smith 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 and practices of becoming anarchival.

Anarchival Materiality in Archives | 

The starting point for this new project emerged while Trudi Lynn Smith and Kate Hennessy were together looking at a set of drawings in the Chicago Field Museum Archives in 2013. Collected for the World’s Fair in 1893, they observed that the oil pastel drawings, given time and archival storage, made marks through the drawings, seeping and imprinting onto the backs of papers. The residue was a testament to the liveliness of materials and of archives. These new material traces become their own archive – rather than a narrative history, they become a story of how materials interact. They provide a starting point to think about the anarchival within archives. Since that initial encounter, they have created work in collaboration with the British Columbia Archives, the Tumbler Ridge Paleontology Research Centre,  Documentary Educational Resources (DER), and in relation to a number of sites, technologies, and ideas.

Archives are generally perceived as arrested in time, imagined as latent instrumental objects to reveal the past. However, Smith and Hennessy share an interest in questions about the anarchival properties of archives. That is, how do archival documents, imagined as permanent, static objects, actually change over time and make new marks?  While archival ordering seeks to makes sense and reiterate dominant and stable narratives of nation states, how do new material traces suggest that archives are vibrant matter, what political theorist Jane Bennett (2010) names as that capacity of things to act as forces? How are archives are not only storehouses of the past but living breathing generative matter? In what way do they emerge, and what do they look like? How are archives infused with anarchic energy, and with disorder? To consider the vitality of matter in archives is to articulate how archives are not outside of us, not of the past or for the future, but how they run alongside and in relationship with humans. To advocate for anarchival materiality is to help to give space to consider more attentive encounters between humans and the more than human world. It is also a way to begin to explore archives not as “perfection” of ordering and preservation, but as an ongoing mediated realm that is deeply political and both reproducing and challenging the settler colonial politics of the archive.

Hennessy and Smith explore how chemical reactions and residue – often the domain of archival conservators – become important to visual anthropology and media archaeology. As exploration that begins by documenting the residue of archives, found on the back of drawings and other material, or the vibrant signal of magenta film, Smith and Hennessy use materiality as a guiding force in their research-creation practice. This provides a basis to construct alternate approaches to emphasize both the material and discursive manifestations of culture (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011). Using photography and video, printmaking, and artificial intelligence, technologies historically and structurally tied to archives, Smith and Hennessy document the transfer of materials from one form and shape to another. As archives are understood as contained spaces of order, how does the excess of the archive – what is being generated out of the original document by nonhuman powers — show us about the role of materiality as an ongoing matter for inquiry?

This long-term project has found expression through a range of media in a number of exhibitions and publications, and is currently being developed into a book.

Publications and Reviews:

Hennessy, K. and Smith, T. (2023)
Fugitive Memory: For Tu’i Malila. In, Gentle Dismantlings, a collaborative special issue of Branch Magazine and Ding Magazine. Winter, 2023. Edited by Kit Braybrooke, Julia Kloiber, and Michelle Thorne [link to article]

Gentle Dismantlings, Special Collaborative Issue of Branch and Ding Magazines.

Fugitive Memory 1. Anthotype print. Trudi Lynn Smith and Kate Hennessy, 2023.

Hennessy, K., Smith, T., DiPaola, S., Nejad, A. (2023)
Sensing the Cloud: Research-Creation as Sensory Anthropology. In, Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Anthropology. Phillip Vannini, Ed. London: Routledge. Pp. 248-262. [link]

Excerpt from white clouds in blue sky (2022). Preview 1 min 50 sec.
Original work 6 mins. 25 sec. By Kate Hennessy, Trudi Lynn Smith, and Steve DiPaola.

Smith, T., and Hennessy, K. (2020)
Anarchival Materiality in Film Archives: Toward an Anthropology of the Multimodal. Visual Anthropology Review 36(1):113-136. [pdf]

Visual Anthropology Review, Spring 2020. Featuring a cover image from Hennessy and Smith’s experimental video To The Burning World (2018-19).

Robinson, J. C. (2020)
Fugitives in the Archive (exhibition review essay).Visual Anthropology Review 36(1):170-177. [pdf]

Smith, T., Hennessy, K., Neumann, O. (2019)
Anarchival Materiality: The Bauhaus Building in Dessau. In, Bauhaus Futures. Laura Forlano, Molly Wright Steenson, Mike Ananny, Eds. Pp. 185-193. MIT Press .

Hennessy, K. and Smith, T. (2018)
Fugitives: Anarchival Materiality in Archives.
PUBLIC 57 (Archive/Counter-Archives): 128-144. Edited by Susan Lord and Janine Marchessault. [pdf]

Smith, T., and Hennessy, K. (2018).
Fugitives: Anarchival Materiality in the Archive [Photo Essay].
Geist (Spring, 2018). Pp. 48-54.

Exhibitions:

Hennessy, K. and Smith, T. (2020) Fugitive Structures: The Bauhaus Building in Dessau. 
Field/Works: kaleidoscopic activities between anthropology and art. EASA AntArt Network. July 2020 – ongoing.

Risograph image remediating a Hollow cinder block. Adapted from Conservation and Preservation of the Bauhaus Building in Dessau by Monika Markgraf. Trudi Lynn Smith and Kate Hennessy 2018.

Hennessy, K. and Smith, T. (2018)
Fugitives in the Archive [Exhibition].
Royal British Columbia Museum Pocket Gallery and Light Box Gallery. Nov. 1 2018- Jan. 1 2019.

Smith, T. and Hennessy, K (2017).
Residue: Proximal Interactions (video, 4 min 32 sec) in Stranger Lands, 500X Gallery, Dallas, Texas. Curated by Julie Libersat. May 6 – June 6, 2017.