Pauline van Mourik Broekman: Your Preface brings to mind discussions in 2019 around HBO’s historical drama, Chernobyl, around which there was a lot of confusion relating to the composite character of Ulana Khomyuk, played by Emily Watson. The creators’ decision to compact the courageous investigations of multiple scientists – among which women counted relatively highly in the post-WWII Soviet Union – into those of one, single, female character seemed fascinating at the time; an admission that mainstream pictorial conventions of collectivity refuse to progress – in fact, appear mostly to be moving in reverse.
Of course, your group – and this Preface – has instead engaged the polyvocal ‘exploded consciousness’ of Alexievich, via Marder and Tondeur, which – as a representational optic, an authorial sensibility – might stand as an antonym to the Chernobyl’s directors’ artistic approach? In their case, a small counter-gesture was at the time achieved by the release of podcast episodes simultaneous to the television ones, in which all their decisions were discussed, and the historical detail extensively set out – including via historical television/film content around which conversations and comparisons occurred on social media. Given the central narrative ploy however, this seemed in every meaningful respect to occur ‘out of frame’.
I mention this example because it presents an environment equally – if differently – hostile to collective, disappropriative activity as the global corporate university: commercial television ‘streamers’, which harness public curiosity about history, facticity, the archive, and global experiential truths, only to poison its potential. Because you have decided to sit at the juncture of image and textual production, I am curious to what degree you are influenced by phenomena in these larger domains?
It seems for example to speak to your project that corporate cannibalisation of the past is rife on these platforms – on which some of the largest, most expensive commissions have either been historical dramas, or explicitly derived from historical or newly available digitised content (viz., most conspicuously, Peter Morgan’s The Crown, but also the true-crime genre that has acted as a key commercial engine, as well as countless ‘minor’ documentaries clearly built out from the IP and commissioning value of personal video-archives that were presumably spontaneously created by individuals in their free time, such as Kingdom of Us (2017), Lucy Cohen’s affecting documentary about mental health and ‘dysfunctional’ families, to name a random example).
But more importantly, too, a process is in train within which the potentially multiple, contingent, processual and open-ended is locked down into mythicised narratives that are culturally encoded as factual: a variation in the historical-dramatic genre of what Mary Anne Doane’s The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002) analyses more generally as modern cinema’s defining characteristic: imposing linearity and, thus, some form of narrative predetermination).
I never understood critics’ unqualified enthusiasm about the Chernobyl programme, which seems in every way semiotically necrotic, but still often wonder exactly what kind of cultural object it was, especially in a context that many have described as ‘agnotological’ (i.e. where systematic, orchestrated forgetting fosters reactionary – read: white-supremacist and fascist – energies, as theorised by Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger in various contexts).
To imagine that anything else could happen within such a format is probably wrong-headed, but there were moments where the public acts of deconstruction performed via side-by-side comparisons of television scenes with their original inspiration – historical footage – seemed to offer something generative; a collaborative re-writing of sorts. The ‘steal this footage’ feature attached to Steal This Film, a series of documentaries on piracy made in the early 2000s, seemed to offer something comparable (http://footage.stealthisfilm.com/browse); and at the furthest reaches of libidinized platform content, I would say something similar is even offered in post-episode chicanery and collective satirical ‘citation’ of programmes like Love Island, after broadcast, albeit again to hegemonic ends… Do you feel that the collective activity you engaged in together partakes in any way of these economies or can be fenced off; and in which case, how would you picture the fence (as some kind of amalgam or assemblage of social, technical, geographic structures)? You answer this question already vis a vis nationalist and individualising tendencies: I suppose as an artist I’m trying to be more figurative and find some kind of picture?
The artist Kandis Williams speaks persuasively of the battleground that archives and citation will become in our hybrid public realm and is worth quoting at length on this question (that is, if we accept that open-access, ‘living books’ and their contents are de facto archival):
“I see the resurgence of the archives in the coming years being played out via media wars instigating a technocratic overhaul of all major forms of colonial infrastructure. The forward-facing interest in archives is a public response to the burden of dis-identifying with commonly held and widely resurgent white supremacist idealization and degradations. Colonial-genocidal interest in the other is a long-held source of many acts of violence, seeded in many fields. Understanding how deeply historical and mainstream narratives have slighted and dispossessed so many I think will cause more and more outcry and public pain. Pain that cannot and is bound to be recuperated by the practice of citation and of personal and collective archiving. This pain has for so long been destructive to communities that are simultaneously being eradicated and their cultures shuffled and filed in anecdotal or reliquary footnotes. There are so few understandable and reliable protocols to archive the unseen (that pain) that a kind of categorization and experiential crisis will emerge as both political mandates to divest from the virtual altogether and heightened stakes of digitization. With much of the power to record for permanence and monetization still being held by entertainment, commercial and institutional sectors, I think our stories will suffer the same turn of phrase [sic] at a faster pace of much media of people who’ve moved from marginal to the mainstream before us” (@kandis_williams, Instagram story featuring magazine article, reposted from @agnesesacchini, March, 2022).