Curating Other-Archives: Witnessing, Care, and Image Afterlives

I think about why we write letters—as an
antidote to distance, as a cure for miles and the
spaces that stretch between us. I think about
the distance that is between us which is only
the distance of life and death which isn’t so
great a distance as I once imagined.
— (Miller)

How do we witness the violence of coloniality with care for archives and the voices, bodies, and spirits they house? Which forms of witnessing are possible when witnessing has become so tethered to sight, a mode of perception so inextricable from colonial histories of visuality and its economies of the display of subjugated peoples? How do we work through the visual economy of colonial archives to arrive at a different kind of account?

These questions emerged in the process of curating For Alberta and Victor: A Collection of Conjurings and Opacities, a solo exhibition by visual artist La Vaughn Belle which I guest curated in Copenhagen in 2021. A site-specific intervention, the exhibition originated from an invitation by ARIEL—Feminisms in the Aesthetics, an independent curatorial project housed at the Women’s Building. Located in the center of Copenhagen, the building is layered with unremembered histories, in particular the 1905 Colonial Exhibition at Tivoli Gardens, an amusement park that hosted a series of colonial exhibitions of human subjects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Belle’s exhibition at the Women’s Building engaged with the residue of this history, with particular attention to the afterlife of Danish colonial presence in the former Danish West Indies and the representational qualms of working with the visual archives that document colonial encounters.

The Women’s Building was co-founded in 1937 by Emma Gad, an author, exhibition-maker, and etiquette specialist, who started the building to support women’s activities and associations. Gad was also the head of the Exhibition Committee of the 1905 Colonial Exhibition, which undertook many efforts to put people from the various Danish colonies in Greenland, Iceland, and Faroe Islands on display. After several failed attempts to bring two adults from the Danish West Indies, the committee forcefully displaced to Copenhagen two children from St. Croix, the seven-year-old Victor Waldemar Cornelins and the four-year-old Alberta Roberts. They arrived together in Denmark in the summer of 1905 and became one of the exhibition’s main attractions. Newspaper articles of the time report that every day, thousands of visitors came to visit the exhibition and look at 11 the children.

When the Colonial Exhibition ended, the Exhibition Committee did not return the children to their families on St. Croix. Instead, they were placed in an orphanage in the center of Copenhagen. The newspapers of the time conveyed the colonial rationale for this decision: “It is in all cases the best solution; at home, no one either misses them if they stay here, or takes care of them when they return” (Politiken). Alberta died prematurely at the age of 16, reportedly due to tuberculosis but most likely of neglect, while Victor lived out the rest of his life as a teacher in Denmark, where he passed away in 1985.¹

There are no visible traces of this history in the Women’s Building, which is located a mere 15-minute walk from Tivoli Gardens. ARIEL’s exhibition space in the Women’s Building is on the ground floor, in what used to be a kiosk that opened up to the street. Working with this space raised a series of dilemmas: How to approach an exhibition in a space so burdened by colonial histories of display and racialization, literally a window display? How to enter the delicate story of Alberta and Victor, and how to negotiate (and respect) the limits of what is known and cannot be known about their lives? Which traces adequately evoke and honor their memory, given the risks of reinscribing past injuries?

Due to how Alberta and Victor were cruelly over-exposed during their lives, Belle knew early on that she did not want to use any images of the children that couldbe found in the repositories of Danish cultural institutions or online. Working with visual artifacts that played a defining role in reproducing racial stereotypes raises the dilemmas and contingencies of care. To look at the visual remains of slavery and colonialism necessarily implicates viewers in the same violence that originated such images. As art historian Temi Odumosu writes in “What Is in Our Gaze?”:

We reproduce typologies, and the bodies of unnamed people, over and over again, online and in public space. And we do all this without permission from the original subjects. Still, we continuously conjure ghosts, and then try our best to appease the dead, to give them a more honourable place—perhaps in a book or an exhibition—a “hospitable memory,” in which to finally rest.

Creative and interpretive efforts at shifting the original terms of address of an image are always, to some extent, precarious. As Saidiya Hartman notes in “Venus in Two Acts”, such redressive gestures do not take place outside the visual economy of the colonial archive but through it, negotiating its constitutive limits (13). Writing about Emmett Till’s open casket, Jared Sexton observes: “There is, after all, no such thing as unalloyed looking or an image innocent of the violence it addresses” (71).²

Based in St. Croix, Belle has long engaged with the visual and material remnants of Danish colonial history through her practice. In our initial conversations, she and I wrestled with the conspicuous exhibition space and wondered how to interrupt the display logic of the window. When considering the modestly sized space of the exhibition, we wondered whether it would lend itself to a sensorial shift, a more intimate engagement with the story of the two children, beyond the ocular and towards a broader “ensemble of seeing, feeling, being affected, contacted, and moved beyond the distance of sight and observer” (Campt, Listening 42). We tried to offer such a sensorial shift in the exhibition space. Belle wondered how little the children must have remembered from their childhood on St. Croix, as they had been taken to Denmark so young and before they had the chance to make their own memories. She thus wanted to create a space of care for the memories of their lives in the Danish West Indies, a different kind of archive that could generate and offer an alternative account.

The exhibition featured a seven-minute video work entitled In the Place of Shadows and a large-scale collage entitled Storm—How to Imagine Tropicalia as Monumental. In the following pages, I pay closer attention to the video work to unfold some of the questions that bind witnessing, care, and archives.

In The Place of Shadows meanders through invisible traces of Alberta and Victor on the landscape of St. Croix and in the artist’s own body and memory. Belle wanders through various sites in St. Croix, conjuring presence through her own body, becoming the medium that connects the memory of the landscape with the memories of the two children. The video takes the form of a letter addressed to Alberta and Victor, with Belle speaking to the children in voice-over, interweaving their story with her own memories of migrating from St. Croix to the United States mainland. In weaving her letter with her embodied sensing of the land, Belle invokes and discards archival sources to conjure a more tender connection from the distortions in the historical material.

I want to tell you a story. There was a little girl who traveled to the place called the United States of America. In a way she was already there. It’s still St. Croix, but it was no longer Danish in 1980. By then it was owned by the United States, so perhaps now you understand what I mean. When you leave a colony to go to the mainland, you basically migrate into the same country. You did that too in a way, leaving the Danish West Indies to go to Denmark. But a place inside a place doesn’t mean it’s the same thing. Different rules. Different gaze. I know you know what I mean.³

Reaching out to the children, reconnecting incommensurate histories across time and space, Belle openly grapples with the lingering effects of the colonial gaze. Evoking—but not directly reproducing—a series of images from the colonial exhibition through description, the video wrestles with but also destabilizes the colonial gaze through what Tina Campt has termed “correspondence”: a practice of connecting different time-spaces, when images are reactivated to reimagine Black life, spaces, and bodies in ways that straddle the present and past (“The Afterlives of Images”). In addressing Alberta and Victor, Belle extends a series of gestures to the past, to hold the children in an impossible transtemporal embrace, and to signal a recognition of the comfort and kinship they were owed. Belle’s video letter becomes a conjuring device, a means to open a new line of communication, a portal to reach out with an impossible antidote to separation.

In her book Visitation, Jennifer DeClue suggests that the erasures and distortions in colonial archives often lead to an estrangement between communities and their ancestors. Through correspondence, In the Place of Shadows also attempts to counter that forced estrangement, “mobilizing a love that travels back in time” (DeClue 3). While the video-letter stages an archival encounter that becomes a source for communion between Belle and her ancestors, the letter indirectly addresses viewers in the form of an invitation to bear witness to this encounter. It is a mode of bearing witness that is not tethered to seeing evidence of the past but as a sensibility to presence, which includes forms of intimacy with the past that are sensorial, embodied, spiritual, fleeting, and anti-monumental.

As Avery Gordon et al. remind us, the present is not just haunted by the ghosts of unresolved histories; the ghosts themselves are haunted too, by the irreparable violence inflicted on them and left unacknowledged. Belle offers a necessarily incomplete gesture of retrospective caretaking through In the Place of Shadows, a gesture that does not undo the harm or provide an impossible closure but instead offers a sign of redress so that the ghosts might also receive care in the present, “where there has historically been none” (Odumosu, “The Crying Child” 297).

With this “collection of conjurings and opacities” gathered by Belle, I came to think that the exhibition offered an open-ended archive-memorial that puts the archival form to the test. Belle crafted her own archival form, an “other-archive”5 that disturbs the account in the Danish colonial records and expands what an archive can do: a space to invite viewers into co-presence across time and space, to bear witness and remember what has been left unacknowledged. At the charged space of the Women’s Building, this archive-memorial enacted its own kind of haunting of the space and its surroundings, making an absented story more felt. More than a counter-archive, then, Belle’s poesis creates a different form, a hybrid of archive and memorial, an “other-archive” that creates the conditions for witnessing and staying in touch across time and space, and for creating a different record not only of the past, but of our ongoing redressive gestures. In restoring a line of communication, Belle’s archive-memorial makes room to communicate to Alberta and Victor that they are loved and remembered, adding softer and gentler traces to an archive that harms. This is a prospective gesture, too, a gesture that aims to leave behind another archive of this story, one that destabilizes the extant one and allows for the story of Alberta and Victor to be accessed in a different register.

As performance scholar Rebecca Schneider reminds us, “attempting to account for atrocity can never be complete, but must be ongoing” (140). Curating other-archives is a reparative endeavor, assembling archival, performative, and ghostly matters into new forms with which to access, witness, and engage the past from the present. Such a collection of conjurings and opacities prompts us to recognize the value of open-ended inquiry, of gestures that do not offer closure but acknowledge enduring reverberation. They are reminders that our interpretive and creative interventions are aimed at different times simultaneously: that our interventions address the living, the dead, and the not-yet living.