{"id":3529,"date":"2021-07-14T09:45:02","date_gmt":"2021-07-14T16:45:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hennessy.iat.sfu.ca\/mcl\/?p=3529"},"modified":"2021-07-14T09:52:41","modified_gmt":"2021-07-14T16:52:41","slug":"performance-conservation-materiality-knowledge-project-essay-on-anarchival-materiality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hennessy.iat.sfu.ca\/mcl\/performance-conservation-materiality-knowledge-project-essay-on-anarchival-materiality\/","title":{"rendered":"Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge project essay on ‘Anarchival Materiality’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kate recently met with the exciting Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge<\/a> research group in\u00a0Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge based at the\u00a0Bern University of the Arts, Institute Materiality in Arts and Culture, Switzerland. They recently published this short essay on the presentation and work<\/a>. She discussed questions of conservation of ethnographic documentation and possibilities for the expression of central issues through art practice. She in particular talked about her collaboration with artist-anthropologist Trudi Lynn Smith and their concept of anarchival materiality, and their explorations with magenta film. Our sincere thank you to Julia Pelta Feldman and Hannah H\u00f6lling for the invitation to speak and for the very engaging post on our work.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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JULIA PELTA FELDMAN<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

Exploring anarchival materiality with Kate\u00a0Hennessy<\/h1>\n<\/header>\n
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Conservation involves loss. This is true of every medium, era, philosophy, technique, and approach that conservation ever has or ever will encompass. The very notion of\u00a0conserving<\/em>\u00a0necessarily implies that, absent such efforts, cultural products \u2013 whether made of wood, magnetic tape, tattoo ink and flesh, or ideas \u2013 degrade, attenuate, and eventually disappear.<\/p>\n

Among the criticisms of performance conservation is that it attempts to deny or defy this immutable fact. When Marina Abramovic made ample use of what she calls \u201creperformance\u201d in her 2010 retrospective at New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art, critics objected that she was trying to bring the dead back to life. I do not wish to address such criticisms here, but I understand and share their root motivation: A desire to acknowledge the inevitability of loss and change, rather than resurrect the past \u2013 a fool\u2019s errand, doomed to failure.<\/p>\n

It is thus the task of an effective and ethical performance conservation to keep performance alive without attempting to avoid, elide, or erase the distance between\u00a0here<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0there<\/em>,\u00a0now<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0then<\/em>. In other words, we might understand performance conservation as\u00a0taking the measure of that distance<\/em>, giving it a presence, translating it into an experience. But how does one measure change \u2013 and present or exhibit such measurements?<\/p>\n

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Kate Hennessy shared with us some of the research that led to the concept of \u201canarchival materiality\u201d that she developed with Trudi Lynn Smith.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This question has led me to the work of Kate Hennessy, who is a media anthropologist and director of the\u00a0Making Culture Lab<\/a>\u00a0at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, as well as a member of the\u00a0Ethnographic Terminalia Collective<\/a>. Hennessy approaches cultural heritage from innovative and experimental perspectives, applying scholarly as well as artistic, technological and collaborative methodologies to support and document Indigenous and settler histories. With our focus on preservation, when we met with Hennessy, we asked her about the legacy of \u201csalvage anthropology,\u201d in which predominantly white anthropologists sought to record the cultures of Indigenous groups whose very existence was under threat by encroaching settlers. Of course preservation is important in many complex ways, Hennessy responded, but salvage anthropology is embedded in the colonial practices and philosophies that spurred it. Instead, she emphasized, preservation efforts today have a better chance of success if they are directed from within a community, rather than by researchers outside it. The analogy to performance conservation is imperfect \u2013 an artist is, in a sense, a community or culture of one \u2013 but it is all too easy for museums to impose their own procedures, rather than letting the artist\u2019s and the work\u2019s needs lead their practices.<\/p>\n

Addressing such histories of their discipline, Hennessy and her collaborator Trudi Lynn Smith, an artist and anthropologist, propose the idea of \u201canarchival materiality,\u201d which they call a \u201cforce of entropy in archives and collections.\u201d[1]<\/a>\u00a0For Hennessy and Smith, attention to a document\u2019s form and physical substance allows us to identify and conceptualize the implicit gaps and losses in the document\u2019s content and meaning. In particular, anarchival materiality is a tool for questioning the authority and durability of the forms of documentation that have been and, indeed, continue to underlie the field of anthropology. The notion evolved from Hennessy and Smith\u2019s encounters in archives with fugitive materials \u2013 that is, unstable materials that, even with preservation efforts, lose their information much more quickly than others. Such materials, they note, spur preservation efforts \u2013 climate control, restoration, etc. \u2013 but ultimately elude them; loss is inevitable.<\/p>\n

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Video still,\u00a0To the Burning World<\/em>, Kate Hennessy and Trudi Lynn Smith, 2018. 10 minutes.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

One particularly ephemeral and fragile medium \u2013 and one that has been crucially important for anthropologists \u2013 is color acetate film. Its colors, much more unstable than black and white, deteriorate at different rates and in different ways, leaving a surprisingly vibrant magenta hue. Hennessy and Smith made a new film,\u00a0To the Burning World<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(2018), that exploited this symbol and evidence of decay to measure the distance between now and then \u2013 in time, but also in ethnographic practice and environmental justice. As they explain,<\/p>\n

It is a re-edit of Kelly Duncan\u2019s 1978 film To Build a Better World. The story told by the original film suggests that British Columbia\u2019s forests and plywood industry would have transformative and enduring effects across domestic and industrial worlds. The film promotes capitalist extractivist economies based on timber resources. Following the logic of progress found in the film, this future promises efficient and strong building practices and forest management to be carried out in standardized and predictable ways. In the summer of 2018, while skies over British Columbia glowed magenta and the air was choked with smoke from burning forests, we reworked To Build a Better World to create the digital film loop that slowly layers onto itself until all form is obscured. Our reworking of the magenta film was meant to evoke the extent to which utopian views of natural and industrial worlds have not been realized in the present.[2]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Video still,\u00a0To the Burning World<\/em>, Kate Hennessy and Trudi Lynn Smith, 2018. 10 minutes.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Through anarchival materiality, the new film marks the distance from the original not only in time, but also in meaning and context. It is a conscious and considered use of what was once considered a transparently documentary form. My question is whether we might be able to use anarchival materiality to approach past performance documentation \u2013 and perhaps even to reconceptualize how documentation is made in the present.<\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a>\u00a0Trudi Lynn Smith and Kate Hennessy, \u201cAnarchival Materiality in Film Archives: Toward an Anthropology of the Multimodal,\u201d\u00a0Visual Anthropology Review<\/em>\u00a036, no. 1 (2020): 114.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a>\u00a0Smith and Hennessy, 127.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kate recently met with the exciting Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge research group in\u00a0Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge based at the\u00a0Bern University of the Arts, Institute Materiality in Arts and Culture, Switzerland. They recently published this short essay on the presentation and work. She discussed questions of conservation of ethnographic documentation and possibilities for the expression of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3531,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,94,43,7],"tags":[306,20,182,348,345,347,346],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hennessy.iat.sfu.ca\/mcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3529"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hennessy.iat.sfu.ca\/mcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hennessy.iat.sfu.ca\/mcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hennessy.iat.sfu.ca\/mcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hennessy.iat.sfu.ca\/mcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3529"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/hennessy.iat.sfu.ca\/mcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3535,"href":"https:\/\/hennessy.iat.sfu.ca\/mcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3529\/revisions\/3535"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hennessy.iat.sfu.ca\/mcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hennessy.iat.sfu.ca\/mcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hennessy.iat.sfu.ca\/mcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hennessy.iat.sfu.ca\/mcl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}