Echoing Lena’s remark that archival material intrinsically requires a re-presenting or recontextualization by virtue of expanding time and space, I want to call attention to Susan Breakell’s understanding of trace and the role it plays physically and metaphorically in art-making. Shannon highlight’s Ann Hamilton’s expanding notion of the archive that takes into consideration the labor practices in archiving and art-making: “the way the body through physical labor leaves a transparent presence in material and how labor is a way of knowing” reminds me of Ernesto Klar’s Invisible Disparities performance project. While Ernesto may be part of the “will to dust” endeavor (Invisible Disparities involved the collection of dust from a number of countries and the subsequent fusion of this collection into one “anthropic rock”), I think there is value in looking at the labor of small units or traces of matter (I’ve also had a class with Ernesto and can attest to his sincerity and anti-elitism!). The idea of traces is also palpable in a Jennifer Reeves film, Landfill 16. Reeves buried the footage underground before editing it, allowing traces of fungi and enzymes to leak through the layers of light and image. These traces of matter and mortality are definitely present in Bill Morrison’s nitrate film work.
Thanks, Allie! I love this focus on the archives’ many traces — traces of the humans whose lives are documented in the collection, traces of the other species with whom those lives are lived, traces of the places those records have been and the ways they’ve been handled, traces of the chemical and physical processes that *happen to* records of various materialities, etc.