Fugitives: Anarchival Materiality in Archives

Abstract

In analog and digital archives, issues of material loss are met with tools of resistance, ranging from simple freezers, to fire-resistant bunkers, to complex robotic systems. While entropy is usually resisted by archivists, this paper draws attention to what we call anarchival materiality, or the generative force of entropy in archives. We theorize anarchival materiality through our oral history research with archivists and curators and parallel video and photography work in the British Columbia Provincial Archives. We describe how non-human archives and their human stewards both constrain and enable preservation. Classification systems, spatial organization and human responsibilities are all fundamentally reshaped and determined by the uncooperative residents of archives, who constantly remind their caretakers of the transformative and organic passage of time.

Anarchival Materiality in Film Archives: Toward an Anthropology of the Multimodal

“…In our initial work with the British Columbia Provincial Archives (Hennessy and Smith 2018), we explored the multiple ways in which archives and objects become fugitive, for example, because they exist outside of the order of the archive, because human caretakers decide they are no longer valuable, and because materially they cannot be preserved. The failure of motion picture film is a harbinger of the fugitivity of all things, a disruption (both rapid and glacial) that works against promises of standardization and safeguarding in archives and collections.…”

“…Barbara Flueckiger’s recent discussion of the film as a tangible object reminds us of the multisensory aspects of film decay, “accumulating olfactory, haptic, and even acoustic dimensions” (2012, np). Bill Morrison’s work with decaying and disintegrating film shows the limits of materiality and preservation (Carone, 2017) . Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) was made from found nitrate footage discovered buried within a swimming pool and ice rink under the permafrost in Dawson City, Yukon, Canada.…”

“…We began to see a tension between preservation of archival materiality and the identification and mitigation of anarchival materiality as a force that we wished to visualize through our visual research and art‐anthropology practice. As we worked together in our photography studio with nitrate negatives, film reels, piles of acid‐burned paper, and other curious objects, we came to understand fugitivity as an expression of what we call anarchival materiality (Hennessy and Smith 2018; Smith, Hennessy, and Neumann 2019).…”

Ethnographic Installation and “The Archive”: Haunted Relations and Relocations

“…Different nonhuman forces in the archive can also be seen as reverberations of what Hennessey and Smith, following Bennett (2010), call “vibrant matter” (2018, 131). With any element in the archive, there are lingering and tugging resonances, echoes, hauntings, associations, traces, and the like .…”

Fugitives in the Archives Curated by Kate Hennessy and Trudi Lynn Smith, November 2, 2018–January 1, 2019, Pocket Gallery and Lightbox Gallery, Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, BC.

“…For the Fugitives project, Hennessy and Smith document and creatively engage with the processes of what they term anarchival materiality or “the generative force of entropy in archives” (Smith and Hennessy 2018, 130). In this volume and elsewhere, they have written about the history of the object artworks featured in the exhibition and how the notion of fugitivity has come to structure their research‐creation (Hennessy and Smith 2018; Smith and Hennessy 2018). While working in the archives of Chicago’s Field Museum, they discovered the imprint of pastel drawing left on the manila folder in which it had been kept.…”