Introduction: Reflecting on Witnessing/Care & the Archive 2023
Inward Outward engages critically with the complex interrelations of archives, coloniality, sound and moving images. For the third iteration of our symposium (on March 16 and 17, 2023) we convened conversations on witnessing, care and repair in the archive. We sought to mobilise Witnessing/Care together, as complementary practices, calling to each other as tools to move through the archive, but that may also be wielded in tension. We also deployed these words as verbs to highlight a form of implication, a refusal to conceive of archival work as a passive performance.
The terms witnessing and care have gained a fair amount of currency in recent times, as public institutions scramble to deal—or give the appearance that they are dealing—with calls to “decolonize” archives, to “redistribute” looted memories, to “redress” irreparable wrongs. As a consequence, while there have been some significant propositions to grapple with these words, there has also been much hollow noise.
So what could one more of these conversations really do?
Rather than adding to the din, and resisting trends that propose “best practices” or formulaic solutions to complex issues, the presentations at Inward Outward stressed the persistence of difficulty. Our conversations offered no suggestions that a panacea might be found, no indication of a new pro-forma method for finding novel ways, yet again, to make visible what so many in Europe do not wish to see. Rather, we interrogated what was—and continues to be—related to the protracted period of modernity; this post-enlightenment moment in which extractivism and the “thingification” of peoples, animals, plants and vital elements is the norm.
During the sessions, the contributors positioned the stakes of what it means to “witness”, what it means to “care”, deliberately and precisely in relation to the specificity of the locatedness and the intentions of their work. Together, we asked ourselves how to witness and care for the living in these violent times, how to turn to those who have lived before, and what to record for those to come. Across the presentations, we heard how “truth”, “fact”, the very so-called archival and documentary staples, keep shifting under our feet. So, we must start moving, perhaps even dancing.
What matters then, is not determining what happened, but asking who is able to draw on archival evidence in order to be able to speak, to be heard, and indeed to live. And with the word “speaking”, we mean all forms of embodied articulation that gain valency from both notes and silences, from singularity but also repetition, from openness as well as opacity.
While we began the symposium by focusing on witnessing and care, we slowly moved towards “repair”, another favoured word in these times. But we did not focus on repair in itself. Rather, as we thought for a while about the title for this session of the symposium, we decided on “beyond repair”. We thought this phrase to hold a beautiful idea because it suggests two associative directions: to be 7 beyond repair means the state of an object or situation is such that it cannot be repaired, it lies over the borders of the land of the reparable. “Beyond repair” also invites us to think beyond the seduction of repair as an ideal, as the aim of our work. It is enticing to believe that if only we could repair the broken object, it would all be over, our work would be done. The object would then cease to be of interest to us, no longer deserving of our labour. But in such a scenario, what happens to the most broken things, those things that are perhaps most in need of tending?
We chose “moving beyond repair” to indicate that we are trying to shift our collective gaze to what lies beyond the paradigm of repair and what is excluded from it. Hereby we signal our intention to imagine the aims of our work not as something to be done with, something with an end, but as an expanding repertoire of situated, individuated and co-determined responses to the variety of ways in which the brokenness of the past presses into the present—and the present as a horizon that moves with us.
In highlighting issues of care, witnessing and repair the presentations wove together many threads, but below we offer three thematic patterns that cut across the two-day symposium, and that we want to hold on to:
• There were presentations that highlighted the temporal collapses that working with care in archives creates—here we can think of artist Lavaungh Belle writing to ancestors who are children in Daniela Agostinho’s presentation; the chronicity of colonial and migratory flows Amade Aouatef M’charek’s traces through the movements of bodies, sponges and phosphorus in Tunisia; the empty museums of Palestine that simultaneously call to pasts and futures in Noor Abuarafeh’s work; and Athambile Masola’s practice of naming, invoking, conjuring those who have passed so that they might, as Edine Célestin said, “live forever”. These archival engagements demonstrate that while we are in the long wake of colonialism, we also live with multiple temporalities that evade linearity, that loop, swirl and fold. These temporal patterns attest to the “living-on” of life.
• Many presentations emphasized that caring, witnessing and moving beyond repair are embodied practices. Citing the work of Isabelle Stenghers, Amade Aouatef M’charek described this corporeal disposition as an art of paying attention, a way of following the minute, the traces and the residues.
Similarly, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung invited the audience to listen—really listen—to what transpires through sounds, in the interstices of linguistic folds and breaths. These practices found resonance in performances by Sites of Memory, and the flesh witnessing of Yvonne Ng’s talk, but also in a widening of what the embodied is via Aylin Kuryel’s dreams and Nikolaus Pernezcky’s films as bodies of inscription.
• In rethinking the body of the archive in these ways, questions of agency emerged. Our agency, as subjectivities working and dancing in/with/through the archive, but also, as Edine Célestin reminded us—the agency of archives themselves as animated, alive, full bodied. This led us to consider how the archive might not want to be remembered, and that some memories cannot afford to be kept. At times, the archive must remain hidden to persist, as Noor Abuarafeh’s buried objects attest, or they convey impossibility as valuable knowledge to be transmitted. The archive (as ghost, human, animate matter or object) might refuse to be held and remembered; thereby refusing, re-making, our patterns of knowing and shifting relations of care, of witnessing, and of repair. In these cases, an archival ethics of care entails an implicated witnessing of this agency, an attention to the constellations of re-made and re-fused connections. At times, it means stepping-back, following or letting-go.
Of course, such careful engagements require intensive labour, as the working session beautifully led by Stevie Nolten and Carine Zaayman clearly revealed. It is also a process for which we are not always ready (we are thinking here of the last line of Makhosazana Xaba’s poem, which is shared in full in Athambile Masola’s intervention in this collection).
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What follows is an assemblage of articulations, rearticulations, thoughts and reflections drawn from the collective work that took place at Inward Outward’s third edition “Witnessing/Care & the Archive”. The works included in this collection were brought together through an invitation to all presenters of Inward Outward to contribute. In some cases, presenters have agreed to share abridged transcripts of their talks, in others, they share reflections or further thoughts inspired by their experiences at the symposium itself. The contributions thus offer a mix of different writing approaches and styles, including essays, reflections, conversations and more visual pieces.
Daniela Agostinho opens the publication, as she did the 2023 symposium, with her presentation “Curating Other-Archives: Witnessing, Care, and Image Afterlives”, reflecting on what it means to care for the people whose spirits manifest in exhibitions which rely on colonial archives and their memories of violence.
Athambile Masola describes the responsibilities we owe as storytellers to the people whose stories we conjure, and how part of that responsibility can be fulfilled by taking our work out of university settings in “Ukugcina amagama: Keeping Names”, based on her experiences creating a series of children’s books on the lives of South African women.
Evelyn Wan continues a conversation she began as moderator of the 2023 panel on Witnessing, meditating on the power of hauntings and conjurings. In “On Spectrality as a Method of Care”, she challenges us all to become haunted scientists as we deliberate whether and how to let archival ghosts speak or rest in peace.
Edine Célestin’s contribution, “Living Archives: The Challenge of Capturing Memory in a Photographic Project”, blends images created by her photography collective K2D with lessons learned while creating those images.
Nikolaus Perneczky’s contribution pivots from the challenges of making visual archives to those of maintaining and sharing them, and shares lessons European archivists might learn from in “Moving Image Restitution in Australia: Towards an Indigenous Critique”.
Yvonne Ng takes us further into the idea of witnessing as action, sharing her experiences of working for WITNESS, an organization that supports activists who use video and other recording technology to advocate for human rights around the world in “Strengthening Community-Based Human Rights Video Witnessing”.
Luc Marraffa, a participant in the 2023 Inward Outward working session, brings their insight on working with sound archives and how to find meaning between the words in “[Deep Breath] Witnessing Beyond Discourse in Colonial Sound Archives”.
Aylin Kuryel closes the publication by taking us out of the conscious world and into that of dreams, where reality, memory and activism blend and are remade in “Dreaming in Public”.
Looking back at these contributions and the conversations of March 2023, we are saddened to observe that the world has become even less liveable for so many. In the current moment of conflict and loss, the forces of oppression are exerting power also through controlling what can be publicly attested to, which witnesses are afforded a space to speak and whose testimonies are taken seriously. We are thus faced even more intensely with the difficulty, and at times seemingly impossible work of care and repair. And yet, we are compelled to keep dancing on the shiftin sands, to connect to and bring into view, as we hope to do in this publication, those temporalities in which other frameworks for relating might emerge.
If you have any thoughts or reflections on reading this publication, we invite you to get in touch with us at inwardoutward@beeldengeluid.nl.
— Inward Outward 2023 Editorial Team
Rachel Somers Miles, Alana Osbourne, Alison Fischer, Carine Zaayman, Eleni Tzialli, Isabel Beirigo, Wayne Modest