Making Worlds: Reimagining the Archive

Recent efforts to address issues of world, global, or planetary scale point to the necessity of rethinking academic discourse and practice in dialogues with literary fiction, art, and performance. If art history strives for what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls “cognitive justice,” or the championing of pluralistic ways of knowing, then its form and presentation ought to be equally varied.  

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. 

Eunsong Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Northeastern University. She is the author of gospel of regicide (Noemi 2017), and with Sung Gi Kim she translated Kim Eon Hee’s poetic text Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days? published in 2019. Her monograph, The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property (Duke 2024) materializes the histories of immaterialism by examining the rise of US museums, avant-garde forms, digitization, and neoliberal aesthetics, to consider how race and property become foundational to modern artistic institutions. In 2021 she co-founded offshoot, an arts space for transnational activist conversations.

Carine Zaayman is an artist, curator and scholar. She is committed to critical engagement with colonial archives and collections, specifically those holding strands of Khoekhoe pasts. Her work focuses on the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, particularly in the Cape, by bringing intangible and neglected histories into view. Her research aims to contribute to a radical reconsideration of colonial archives and museum collections, especially by assisting in finding ways to release their hold over our imaginations when we narrate the past, as well as how we might shape futures from it.