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Preserving [Spectral] Knowledge: Indigeneity, Haunting, and Performing the Embodied Archive
- Author(s):
- Sam Regal (see profile)
- Date:
- 2022
- Subject(s):
- Indigenous peoples, Indigenous peoples--Study and teaching, Archives--Administration, Archival resources--Management, Archival materials--Management, Archives--Collection management, Archival materials--Conservation and restoration, Archives, Performance art
- Item Type:
- Presentation
- Tag(s):
- 2022 ARLIS/NA Conference, Indigenous studies, Archival management and conservation
- Permanent URL:
- https://doi.org/10.17613/xn6r-at45
- Abstract:
- Conservation and archives practitioners face practical and ethical challenges when tasked with the preservation of intangible indigenous artworks. Indigenous knowledge is often communicated in the form of embodied performance: it is transmitted through ceremonies, rituals, oral tradition, and lived experience. Indigenous knowledge is also relational, predicated on the belief that “[k]nowledge is shared with all of Creation […] It is with the cosmos, it is with the animals, with the plants, with the earth that we share this knowledge.” In approaching such material through a postcustodial lens, and invoking the Records Continuum Model (RCM), practitioners must appreciate the human body as a form of archive. As a body/archive, it is densely relational, inter- and multidimensional, affectively activated, and imprecisely duplicatable. Complications concomitantly abound. What happens when Indigenous people self-consciously confront and employ tropic mechanisms? This, as I see it, is a charged nexus through which we might better understand the embodied archive, spectral indigeneity, and the challenges of preserving these conceptual materials. My research examines the work of Jordan Abel and Rebecca Belmore, two contemporary Indigenous artists, and considers how their performance practices serve as forms of archival bodies. I also interrogate preservation practices surrounding these materials through a postcustodial lens.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 11 months ago
- License:
- Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
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