THINKING IN ARCHIVES | ARTS, ARCHIVES & PERFORMANCES
The photographs, which are autochromes – the first photographic process that allowed for the reproduction of colour – were made in Dahomey (now Benin) in 1930. Courtesy of The Albert-Kahn Museum.
How do we begin to look at an image collectively? What are the ways in which a visual archive – entrenched in the heavy histories of colonialism and rendered silent through an extractive approach to photography – can begin to speak? In provoking and surfacing the narratives embedded in these archives, it is music, performance, improvisation and collaboration that can become vital tools for re-reading images in a contemporary way.
From 1 to 5 August 2022, The Centre for the Less Good Idea welcomed a group of artists, academics and researchers into the workshop for Arts, Archives & Performances, an experimental, performative and playful space for exchange and dialogue between artists and thinkers whose practices are devoted to the material traces of colonial history. Participants came from Abomey, Benin; Paris, France; Johannesburg, South Africa; Bogotá, Columbia; Brussels, Belgium; and Vienna, Austria.
The five-day workshop was a physical extension of a series of conferences, co-organised by Bronwyn Lace (SO Academy, Johannesburg, South Africa), Didier Houénoudé (University of Abomey Calavi, Benin) & Anna Seiderer (University of Paris 8, France) and developed within the framework of the research project Animated Images, Controversial Memories [CINEMAF].
The series of conferences, developed within the framework of the research project [CINEMAF], engages in an artistic reflection on the issues of remediation, analysis and reuse of filmic materials produced in controversial historical contexts. Conceived as a space for exchange between artists, curators and scholars, it explores the gestures and artistic forms through which the material traces of colonial history are sketched out and reformulated.
Looking at an image collaboratively
Day 1 of Art, Archives & Performances workshops at The Centre for the Less Good Idea.
At the onset of the Arts, Archives & Performances workshop, collaborators were invited to engage with a collection of photographs from the Musée départemental Albert-Kahn in Paris. The photographs, which are autochromes – the first photographic process that allowed for the reproduction of colour – were made in Dahomey (now Benin) in 1930 and are part of a larger project, the Archives of the Planet, funded by French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn (1860-1940).
Following a brief introduction to Kahn and his Archives of the Planet project by Julien Faure-Conorton – a process that prompted an organic collaboration between Faure-Conorton’s spoken lecture, Pélagie Gbaguidi’s live-drawing and Thabo Rapoo’s sonic improvisations – participants responded to specific images from this archive. These ranged from spoken responses and interpretations to musical, physical, and interdisciplinary performances that sought to both surface and activate the inherent and unseen elements of the images.
The idea of tasking participants with providing an artistic response to a single image is inspired by Sabine Theunissen, a frequent collaborator of William Kentridge and The Centre for the Less Good Idea. While Theunissen engaged archival images in a very deliberate way for her animated research film White Box Jacket, the exercise in the Arts, Archives & Performances workshop allowed for a more open-ended engagement with the photographs. These visual provocations and the collaborative, experimental engagements they generated, provided a rich point of departure for the participants. They allowed for the emergence and development of a number of conceptual threads that were ultimately woven throughout the workshop.
Engaging projection through the Pepper’s Ghost
The hybrid analogue and digital mechanism of the Pepper’s Ghost became a vital tool in the exploration and activation of photographic archives through performance.
The remainder of the workshop saw participants collaborating with one another and with the space itself. For many, this emerged through embracing many of the central methodologies of The Centre – collaborative making, free-spirited engagement with materials, and the act of allowing oneself to be led by image, sound and impulse – in order to surface, rupture, re-read and activate the heavy histories and enduring realities located in the Albert-Kahn Museum’s photographic archive.
In particular, the use of the Pepper’s Ghost – a 19th-century theatrical illusion mechanism that makes use of a half-silvered mirror, video compositing, projection and live performance – became a hugely productive tool for engaging with – through music, dance, drawing, live narration and more – the videos and photographs that have remained otherwise silent and inactive in the archive.
Here, myriad sounds, gestures, and materials became tools for layering, agitating, rescripting and expanding upon the people, places, landscapes, rituals and knowledge systems represented in the images and films. The use of flour, for example, served as an obvious metaphor for the dry, dusty reaches of the archives, but when engaged with through the use of the body, became a way of engaging the images through mark-making and erasure. The use of Artificial Intelligence became another point of entry. Through a combination of live-streaming, projection and the use of AI software programmed to identify images according to a set of 80 modern English words, a haphazard script began to emerge, prompting further engagements from participants.
Enduring questions and collective reflections
The five-day workshop yielded a considerable amount of material, including early iterations of performances, short films, and interdisciplinary artworks. Naturally, the process also uncovered myriad questions, problems, and new points of inquiry.
Questions emerged around the ethical representation of, and engagement with, the people represented in these images. Similarly, the line between risk and respect yielded many interesting reflections – how do we interrogate certain rituals or subjects with a playfulness, a provocation, while also displaying a particular reverence and regard for them? Rather than attempting to resolve these questions, participants used them as further points of entry and provocations towards the generation of new material.
Perhaps the most common reflection was on the need to revisit these archives in a way that short-circuits the conventionally academic approach to research. In engaging the archive in an active, collective, and interdisciplinary manner, new possibilities and tactics are able to emerge. Collapsing and unfolding time through performance becomes a means of destabilising the authority of an image. The act of embracing the incidental and the fragmentary becomes a way of working around the gaps and mistranslations in the historical narratives that accompany these images, pursuing instead the emergent material traces surfaced through the body, the voice, the ensemble. The introduction of language – be it linguistic, musical, or visual – can allow one to give a voice to a silenced image, while the use of physical performance and gesture can challenge, animate and expand upon a frozen or recreated moment.
— David Mann
PHOTOGRAPHER | Zivanai Matangi
CREDITS:
WORKSHOP FACILITATORS | Bronwyn Lace & Phala Ookeditse Phala
PARTICIPANTS | Christine Barthe, Thulani Chauke, Adewole Falade, Julien Faure-Conorton, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Juan Camilo González, Monica Heintz, Didier Marcel Houenoude, Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu, Vusi Mdoyi, Teresa Phuti Mojela, Angelo Moustapha, Damiana Otoiu, Thabo Rapoo, Calvin Ratladi, Alexander Schellow, Anna Seiderer, Thuthuka Sibisi, Jane Taylor, Sabine Theunissen & Khadija Von Zinnenburg Carroll.