Making Worlds: Reimagining the Archive

The first iteration of this program, Making Worlds: Reimagining the Archive features presentations, conversations, and performances by artists and scholars who are animated by the problems and possibilities of the archive—a space of collection and categorization shaped by coloniality. The event is divided into two thematic sessions: “Archival Gaps” and “Archival Abundance.” In the first session, we ask: how can artists and scholars productively critique the gaps, erasures, and violence of the colonial archive? The author Shola von Reinhold provides a possible answer in their novel Lote. The book’s main character discovers fragmentary archival evidence of a forgotten Black British modernist figure, triggering an obsession that sends them deep into history and deeper into the odd corners of the contemporary artworld. Von Reinhold will present a reading of their work and converse with current Wereld Lab fellow and scholar Eunsong Kim. Kim’s recent book The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property reveals the ways that racialized capitalism structured the collecting policies of American museums and archives in the twentieth century. Kim demonstrates how the exclusionary logics of colonialism and property ownership are central to understanding both historical archives and contemporary art’s preoccupation with “immateriality.”  

The second session inverts the first, asking how we might approach archives through the framework of abundance rather than lack. Artist and RCMC scholar Carine Zaayman will discuss her theorization of the “anarchive,” a colonially-constructed archival absence reimagined as a generative site of artistic intervention. Her recent book Seeing What Is Not There: Figuring the Anarchive argues that we must look beyond the violent gaps of colonial erasure to recuperate the indefatigable abundance of life. Artist Satch Hoyt will present his ongoing project “Un-Muting. Sonic Restitutions” wherein he locates, plays, and “un-mutes” the countless number of African musical instruments stored in the silent depots of Western museums. Hoyt will conclude the day with a sonic performance, bringing the potential abundance of the archive to our ears. 

Making Worlds is organized by The Research Center for Material Culture at the Wereldmuseum, Wereldlab Nijmegen, Sonia de Laforcade (Radboud University) and Matthew Mullane (Radboud University).