Witnessing/Care & The Archive

Witnessing—as a verb—always combines the aural and the ocular. Bearing witness, in its common understanding, usually entails recounting something heard or seen. Witnessing also holds religious and legal connotations. These resonate with legal processes of ‘bearing witness’ and Christian evangelizing, and to being ‘called on’ by a higher lawful or spiritual order. If these legal and religious dimensions invoke the dutiful aspect of witnessing, they do not necessarily imply an engaged praxis. When connected to care however, understandings of ‘witnessing’ are further fleshed out and given more intention. Witnessing as care can only be intentional and in relation with that or those which are cared for.

For this Inward Outward session, we invite four speakers who directly engage with witnessing as an embodied practice and relational ethos to present their work and engage in a discussion. Amade Aouatef M’charek, is Professor of Anthropology of Science at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests are in forensics, forensic anthropology and race, with a particular focus on the social aspects of various biomedical technologies and practices. Daniela Agostinho is Assistant Professor at Aarhus University, where she probes the aesthetics and politics of colonial archives in her work on witnessing and archiving war, and in her cultural studies of digital and emerging technologies. Edine Célestin is a photojournalist and human rights activist whose recent book is Kazal – The Memories Of Kazal, A Photographic Approach, published with André Frère Éditions. Yvonne Ng is Senior Program Manager of Archives  at WITNESS, an organization that helps people use video and technology to protect and defend human rights globally. In conversation with Amade, Daniela, Edine and Yvonne, we explore what an embodied practice of witnessing reveals and demands of our archival work. We ask, among other things, when is archival evidence of colonial violence evidentiary enough?

MODERATOR

→ Evelyn Wan (Utrecht University)

SESSION PRESENTATIONS

Vital Elements Post_Colonial Flows: Forensics as an Art of Paying Attention

→ Amade Aouatef M’charek (University of Amsterdam)

Since 2014 more than 23,000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. They have been attended to as “border death” (Last & Spijkerboer, “Tracking Deaths in the Mediterranean”, 2014), crucially, drawing attention to the militarization of Europe’s borders and its migration policy. But what if we made a decolonial move and crossed the Mediterranean, from Europe to Africa? What if we attended to death, not in relation to borders that kill, but in relation to life and livelihood?

The starting point for this talk are the beaches of Zarzis, a southern Tunisian harbor town, where dead bodies have been washing ashore since the mid-nineties. I ask “how did these bodies end up here?” A forensic question that I will not engage in any self-evident way. I reconfigure forensics, from an art of mobilizing evidence and finding closure, to an art of paying attention. A mode of opening up and articulating complex entanglements.

Inspired by forensics, its attention to materialities and temporalities as well as its tenet of following heterogeneous traces, I query the relation between death and the possibilities for life and livelihood by trailing vital elements and the relation between them. Vital elements, I suggest, are materialities that are crucial for fostering life or causing death in their absence. Think of phosphorus, salt, water, or sea sponges. Moving with, and being moved by these materialities and the way they have been part of extractivist practices, I will demonstrate how they help us to see the durability of unequal, (post)colonial relations, underscoring what can flow easily and what is being stopped between Europe and Africa. But these materialities also alert us to the fact that rather than “Europe’s migration crisis” what we are witnessing is a chronic situation of producing life and death.

Curating Ghostly Matters: Spectral Evidence, Witnessing and Colonial Archives

→ Daniela Agostinho (Aarhus University)

As museums, archives and other cultural institutions make their colonial collections digitally available online—giving contested materials a digital afterlife— unresolved histories and new ethical matters are bound to emerge. What can be traced, remembered and imagined through archives rife with omission and harm? And how do we care for the presences and absences they conjure? (Odumosu, “The Crying Child: On Colonial Archives, Digitization, and Ethics of Care in the Cultural Commons”, 2020). In this presentation, I reflect on the exhibition For Alberta and Victor: a collection of conjurings and opacities, by visual artist La Vaughn Belle, that I curated with ARIEL – Feminisms in the Aesthetics in Copenhagen (2021). Grappling with the question, posed by Inward Outward, of “how do we witness the violence of coloniality with care for archives and the voices, bodies and spirits they house or manifest through”, I reflect on Belle’s engagement with the visual archives of Danish colonialism and how she devises a spectral approach to evidence that incites a poetic requalification of witnessing. By approaching the archive as a departure point rather than a site for answers, Belle critically turns away from documentary evidence towards reaching to other sources of proximity and communing with ancestors. Thinking through ghostly matters and care together, this presentation discusses how Belle’s ambivalent engagement with archives seeks to more intimately register absent presences, calling forth a reconsideration of witnessing that not only requires a sensorial recalibration but also a sensibility towards the ghostly, transient, and interior.

Living Archives in a Memory Project

→ Edine Célestin (Kolektif 2 Dimansyon – K2D)

As a medium, photography is one possible way of narrating memory next to more ancient ways such as oral storytelling, writing, theater, etc. At the same time, as a form of witnessing the past, photography is a substance and can be a source of historical knowledge. It reactivates the memory of a historical fact and invites reflection. Photography remains a fragmentary witness, partial, subjective, polysemous: a photograph tells us as much about the photographed subject as it does about its photographer. It remains an interpretation of reality that is never fully within grasp.

KAZAL is a photographic project that traces the memories of the dictatorship of François Duvalier in Haiti through the history of Kazal, a village north of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, where a major event in the contemporary history of the country was perpetrated in March 1969 and obliterated from official history: the massacre of Kazal.

Only rare traces of materials and a few witnesses of this history have withstood the ruin and the passage of time. In line with our previous works, we tackle the challenge of documentary photography head on, conducting interviews, researching sources and fieldwork, and in constant dialogue with the subjects photographed.

This journey was forged by the deep connection with the residents, on the trust built and nurtured over the course of the years between 2015 and 2018, and on many successes and failures. What ultimately prevailed was the determination to return to these same places, to listen, to share, and to bring new research leads, new images, new witnesses.

Over the course of three years, we created a dialogue with the inhabitants of Kazal to interrogate their memories of places and events. For us, what ensued was a true encounter with Haiti’s troubled history and past that, to this day, has not yet been acknowledged.

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Strengthening Community-Based Human Rights Video Witnessing

→ Yvonne Ng (WITNESS)

Misinformation, AI-enabled deepfakes, and authoritarian attacks on truth are on the rise, eroding societal trust in human rights witnessing and video documentation. In response, video documentation strategies and tactics are growing in sophistication to better signal and verify authenticity. Some of the new approaches and tools, however, exclude human rights defenders who could use them the most. Developed within dominant communities of practice in archiving, OSINT, and curation centered in the Global North, these methods often do not suit contexts in the rest of the world, and promote standards that are unrealistic for most to meet.

WITNESS works to democratize access to human rights video skills and resources, while recognizing that the burden of witnessing should be a choice, not an obligation, especially for people impacted by human rights violations. Moreover, we recognize that witnessing and presenting trustworthy evidence is, frustratingly, often not enough to make a difference. Through a combination of direct collaboration with community-based partners; continuous listening, learning, and sharing of knowledge; and systems-level advocacy, WITNESS aims to help others secure human rights change using video and related technologies, aligned with the goals of communities and people who most directly experience human rights violations, and building their power and voice.

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At its most basic, caring for archives is about ensuring they are safe, shielded from intense light, protected from humidity, and cataloged for easy access. It relates to the routine tasks of restoration, collating, filing, digitizing, describing, cataloging etc. that archivists perform. Yet, recent calls for a feminist ethics of care in archival praxis remind us that care work is embroiled in questions of attentiveness and responsiveness (Agostinho “Archival Encounters: Rethinking Access and Care in Digital Archives”, Archival Science 19 (2019): 141–165; Schares “Witnessing the Archive: Stormé DeLarverie and Queer Performance Historicity”, Text and Performance Quarterly 40.3 (2020):  250–267). It is concerned not only with the vulnerability of archives as material but also with the responsibility of the caregiver to witness the voices, flesh, and stories of the archived / as archives. Here caring is an embodied disposition, purpose and praxis that encompasses and supersedes the daily undertakings of working in and with archives.

In dialogue with our speakers, this session aims to unpick the multiple, layered and sometimes contrary articulations of care. Centering a feminist approach to archives of / with care, we engage with Athambile Masola, Lecturer at the Historical Studies Department of the University of Cape Town, and her work on Black women’s historiography and life writing. With reference to the work of Teresa Lanceta and Lester Brown, we work through the deviations of care and its appropriation by capitalist and supremacist structures with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Director of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, thus exploring the layered and contrary notions that care work carries with regards to the colonial and its archives. And we explore how moving image restitution might be articulated through a framework of care with Nikolaus Perneczky, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, thus probing the relationship between care and release.

MODERATOR

→ Priya Swamy (Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen)

SESSION PRESENTATIONS

Ukugcina amagama: Keeping Names

→ Athambile Masola (Poet, Writer, Researcher and Lecturer, University of Cape Town)

My presentation will be a reflection on the practice of care in two projects: Imbokodo, Women Who Shape Us as well as A Stranger at Home (a collection of columns written in 1977 by Noni Jabavu). Both projects are collaborations where I am co-author with Xolisa Guzula and Makhosazana Xaba (respectively). This approach to writing and historical work is a deliberate form of feminist labor with co-creating as an ethic. To care in isiXhosa (my mother tongue) is ukukhathala (v), inkathalo (n) which relates to words such as ukugcina (to keep). These projects are concerned with telling stories and preserving. Both required connection with family members and, if the people we were writing about were still alive, direct communication with them for access to images and fact-checking the biographies. None of these works were commissioned but rather they emerge from a labor of love. Which is to say, to care is to love. What does it mean to love black women, their lives, and their stories enough to recreate them with future generations in mind? What does it mean to care enough about recreating portraits of black women with enough care so that they are aesthetically pleasing for a young audience? What does it mean to care for the dead in order for them to be the living-dead through retelling their stories? These questions mirror the debates which took place behind the scenes in each of these projects.

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Tangentiality of Care? All That Magic. Teresa Lanceta’s Threads Weave and Unweave Lester Bowie’s Sonic Pluriverse

→ Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (Haus der Kulturen der Welt)

There is an inflation of discourses on care. A care that is discussed but doesn’t care about the practice of care. A care that is limited to the surface rather than profundity. This lecture will not discuss care for care’s sake. It will not put cosmetics on the face of careless care, but will tickle out a care for knowledges, histories, spiritualities, politics and ways of being in the world using Teresa Lanceta’s threads to weave and unweave Lester Bowie’s sonic pluriverse.

A look at Teresa Lanceta’s tapestry provokes sound. Sounds that seem to invoke notations or scores for Bowie’s All the Magic. Not just because of the magic in Lanceta’s work, but because of certain phrases, idioms, narrations, mind spaces and landscapes that both the sound and the tapestry seem to interweave. As if Lanceta were writing the score of Bowie’s music after the music had been made, or writing a musical notation that already existed in the noosphere. A kind of writing backwards. A kind of writing back. For more than four decades, Teresa Lanceta has used the medium of weaving to pack histories into symbols and unpack histories from crevices and vaults of the past. For history is not of the past but of the present.

How do we care for histories, especially those histories we don’t find in history books? How do we care for those other non conventional spaces in which knowledges are found? How do we care for the epistemics of murmurations, of hummings, of innuendoes, of gossips, or rumours?

Displaced and Contested Film Heritage: On Discourses and Practices of Care in Global Audiovisual Archiving

→ Nikolaus Perneczky (Queen Mary University of London)

The discourse of care has done much to draw our attention to the profound interdependencies that shape contemporary life, while also showing that the burden of care is unevenly distributed both locally and globally along gendered and racialized lines. Caring for moving images—the preservation, restoration, curation, and archiving of films—raises related but distinct questions, including about the limits of care, which this talk will explore, with a special emphasis on the issue of displaced and contested film heritage. My discussion will move from a critical consideration of the rhetoric of care as deployed by Western archival institutions, to alternative practices and conceptions of care as elaborated by film archivists in the Global South.

Recent years have seen a marked opening by archives in the Global North through broadening access and participation, in particular regarding what is now commonly framed as “shared heritage”, that is, collections of colonial and/or ethnographic provenance. Film archives, too, have been rethinking their responsibilities and protocols of care, often within the framework of “diversity” or “decolonization” policies. I will consider what these efforts at institutional reform have accomplished, and where they fall short. Further extending this line of inquiry, I will then turn to the experience of audiovisual archiving in the Global South: to move beyond what feminist and decolonial scholars have termed “archival paternalism”—and to sketch alternative horizons for taking care of the cinematic commons.

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