Friday, 17 January 2014
Saturday, 28 December 2013
Tuesday, 2 July 2013
Blasts from the past
Out of the Archive: Artists, Images and History
Friday 18 November 2011, 10.30–17.30
Saturday 19 November 2011, 10.30–17.30
Saturday 19 November 2011, 10.30–17.30
In collaboration with the London
Consortium.
This conference was originally conceived by the Colonial Film project team, and coincides with the launch of the Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire website.
This conference was originally conceived by the Colonial Film project team, and coincides with the launch of the Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire website.
I believe it was Jane
Elliott who once toured America
saying that white people know as much about racism as black people: and that
ignorance is first a privilege and then a choice. This is certainly what sprang
to mind over the two days of this conference, which seemed to have a series of
absences and elisions at its heart: absences and elisions to do with audiences
and cultural ownership, and to do with the protocols of archives themselves,
and their meta data.
May Ann Doane,
reliably rigorous in her reading of selected films, and relating her response
to the colonial film archive to her research on the historical sublime, made
the point through example that the colonial film makers felt no need to
identify or differentiate the individuals filmed. She suggested that the
narrative voice over was part of the dehumanisation process, whereby one
African bushman could be substituted for another without explanation.
Yet it seemed to me
that this is exactly what Filipa Cesar had done in Black balance, by
taking archival footage and cutting together a range of clips of different
African nations and cultures in order to make clear – to emphasise – the racism
of the white colonial film makers.
This seems to me to exemplify
the problematic at the core of this publishing of the archive, and of any
discourse around it. When questioned about the content and the audiences for this
material, Frances Gooding suggested that there are many people ignorant of the
Empire’s history, and that this archive will serve as a source of historical
knowledge. What this fails to address however, is the questionable politics of
remobilising these images with only that imperative in mind.
First, because it
ignores what I would suggest is a considerable population sufficiently visually
literate to read back the racism of the original. Secondly because it makes
absent the viewpoint of people from the cultures represented (in the historical
moment of those cultures dispossession), either as a primary text or in its
remobilisation by the artist.
In this way, it
seemed to me that much of the conference ran the risk of re-presentation
without sufficient critique, and without imagining what it might be like to be
viewing this material not as the coloniser, but as the colonised.
Surely we have an
ethical obligation to return these images to the peoples whose history they
document?
By way of comparison,
there has been an Australian exhibition called In living memory which has
attempted to deal with precisely these issues of cultural ownership.
“In Living Memory is a powerful
exhibition of archival photographs from the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board taken
between 1919 and 1966, combined with contemporary images of Elders, families
and communities by senior Indigenous photographer Mervyn Bishop. In Living
Memory first opened in September 2006 and proved to be so important to NSW
Aboriginal people, international visitors and the wider community that is still
remains open at State Records Gallery.”[1]
Some of the protocols
for the making public of these images included consultation with those
photographed, their families and their communities. No image was published
without the express permission of the people represented or their families. So
this archive, whilst a document to the assimilationist policies that destroyed
so many aboriginal lives, became an exhibition that returned in some measure a
sense of history and representation to those whose lives they picture. The
photographs were remobilised in a way that didn’t only refigure the history,
but allowed people to reclaim personal and community histories and represent
them in the present, via public discourse authored by those communities, and by
a photographer who is a member of those communities.
In this way the project
became much bigger than a white masculinist paternalist discourse about the
mess we’re in: it became an effective and expansive political project concerned
with cultural ownership and a dialogue between communities.
What I can’t help but
wonder is: what protocols are in place for the use of material in these
archives; and in the effective, if partial, doubling of the archive that this
online resource represents? How are they being made available to the
communities from which the images were taken? Relying on the idea that the
internet makes these images available to everybody is naïve in the extreme, and
I would hope artists and researchers from the colonised nations represented
would have privileged access to this material. Or perhaps even be consulted
about its publication; of images which represent not just the point of view of
Empire, but, as film and photography cannot help but do, represent something
about these cultures and their history.
Because wherever
those questions are being answered, that is the conference I would like to have
attended.
[1] http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/state-records-gallery/in-living-memory/in-living-memory-exhibition
Thursday, 25 April 2013
Friday, 12 April 2013
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