Reflections on “Encounters: Art, Power and Archives”

The question of what it means for something to become archival, the movement of “object, material, writing, letters” when it is made into the condition of the archive is a transformation that is not passive or neutral. It requires an institution and an understanding and demands that we reckon with what an institution is and what it wants. The archive cannot be understood independently of the institutional structures that produce it.

Consider the constitutive logic of archival institutions, a logic not grounded in abstraction but in the specific trajectory that the Empire and Commonwealth Museum created itself by seeking materials from former colonial administrators and their families, recording oral histories and acquiring what it could. What it is obsessed with is collecting. Its dissolution is as instructive as its formation. The entire arc from colonial households to private museums to eBay to skips to bonded warehouses enacts the same extractive logic across different institutional forms, and that logic is ongoing.

eBay surfaced repeatedly across the symposium’s first day as a site of archival dispersal as the destination for material that exited the circuits of institutional value. Onyeka Igwe connected this to the structure of Empire and Commonwealth Museum’s illegal sales on that platform, which are not an aberration but an illustration of a structural condition: the archive’s relationship to value is relational and contingent. What gets sold, discarded or rescued reveals as much about institutional logic as what gets collected and preserved. The platform of eBay becomes an unlikely index of what institutions decide no longer matters for archival preservation.

Onyeka Igwe raises a concern about the imprecision with which the word “institution” circulated through the symposium. She calls for greater specificity to distinguish between state institutions, community institutions and the family, which was invoked as a space of respite or refuge from institutional power. She questions whether the family-as-institution forms a useful binary with the museum or archive. The family, she argues, operates by structurally analogous logics: it has absences, concealments and acts of unequal transmission that parallel archival silences. She recalls a workshop in which a mother who had hidden photographs of her estranged family from her daughter during a difficult divorce; a common story, she notes, and one in which the familiar charge against the archive that it withholds, selects, suppresses belongs equally to the domestic sphere.

The question of ephemera—small, apparently marginal objects, traces and materials—ran across the symposium’s engagement with queer archival practices, with Jose Muñoz’s scholarship cited as a cornerstone in this thinking. Igwe raised the following questions: Should ephemeral things enter the archive? Where should they be held and how should they be made accessible? These are not merely logistical questions. They are political ones—about whose small things are considered worthy of preservation, under what classification and on whose terms.

Muñoz, José Esteban. “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts” (1996). In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. 2009.

Selection and classification are the governing operations of archives while holding a claim of provisionality. That provisionality matters because it opens up to the possibility that in other cultures and other epistemic frameworks the archive might be organised around entirely different principles. Within institutions, we generally engage with what are structured as colonial archives, where the selection and classification processes determine whose histories are preserved, their form and to what end (the purpose of preservation). Selection and classification are never innocent, meaning that they are the work of power and knowledge that structure and determine these choices.

During the symposium, several contributors observed that the claustrophobia of museums and institutions comes from the sheer volume of the material and content, which is a sign of the affective consequences of the extractive logic. Driven by the impulse to collect and preserve, this produces at times not a richness in the archive but a feeling of suffocation. Claustrophobia is not incidental to the archive; it is what the accumulative impulse feels like from inside it. This connects to the broader question of what it means to perpetuate these structures.

Absence, in the archive and in the family is a structural condition rather than an oversight. Igwe brings this to bear on her own situation through the lens of migration, both from Nigeria to the United Kingdom and internal (within Nigeria), which has severed the transmission of cultural knowledge across generations. Cousins who moved away from their villages did not learn local customs, did not sit with their elders, did not receive the stories that previous generations would have passed down. Those kinds of histories haven’t been passed down. The archive steps into the space left by that rupture, which is not an ideal repository but sometimes is the only one that remains.

This question names the originating tension behind Igwe’s practice. The search for oneself in the archive is never neutral: where one ends up is shaped by what one has been taught to value and where one has been taught to look, as well as by what is materially accessible. When Igwe asked her father about her family history and he told her to “just go and read a book”, she does not dismiss this but holds it as revealing something about her father and about the institutions that stood in for the conversation that did not happen. The archive is sometimes the only destination available, which does not make it an uncomplicated one.

This is a methodological approach that Igwe cites as “critical proximity”: working with colonial archival footage not by simply deploying it but by intervening at the level of grammar in the medium of film. The formal structures and assumptions that make colonial images function as they do, aims to not provide commentary but rather instigate transformation. This method led Igwe during her PhD to the essay “Undoing the Colonial Archive” by Isaac Juien, which confirmed the approach that she was developing independently.

Julien explicitly set out to eliminate voiceover to challenge authority, re-photographed images, slowed material down and refocused them, which are all among the strategies Igwe arrived at instinctively. “Oh yes, I think Julien was doing this… it’s good to know.”

The encounter raises a question she posed to the symposium as a whole: why do artists across different generations and contexts converge around these same approaches? What is the theory behind this method?

Julien, Isaac. “Undoing the Colonial Archive”. In Film and the End of Empire. Ed. Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe. London: BFIPalgrave Macmillan. 2011. pp. pp. 273–75.

Igwe identifies the interjection of the self into the colonial archive as a recurring strategy across the symposium presentations and frames it as a series of open questions rather than a settled method. What does it mean to place one’s body in or against the colonial image? What is produced by that act and what is risked? This provides a connection to bell hooks’s concept of the oppositional gaze: the act of looking back, of refusing the invisibility that colonial visual regimes assigned to those who are marginal in the archival material.

Hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators”. In Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press. 1992.

Igwe noted that reenactment appeared across the symposium in expanded and non-literal forms; not simply as restaging historical events but rebuilding spaces, manipulating photography, staging performances. What connects these practices is a shared question: what is the relationship between the present body and the historical image? What is reproduced in the act of return and what is inevitably, productive and transformed? Reenactment in this extended sense becomes a method of critically inhabiting the material rather than its historical reproduction.

Igwe observed that there was a countertendency towards visibility and access: strategies of remaining at the margins deliberately, of being unruly, blurred, undecipherable. Rather than making marginalised histories legible and thus available to the same regimes of knowledge that produced their invisibility in the first place, several practices insist on finding ways to protect identities and experiences through strategies that embrace opacity. This proposition connects directly to the questions Igwe posed at the close of her remarks: whether counter-archives and dissident materials want to be made accessible at all, and what the benefits of remaining opaque might be.

This highlights the significance and value of the sensorial as a form of archival material. This resonated with Igwe’s own developing preoccupation: what cannot be photographed or catalogued—smell, touch, a sonic atmosphere, the feeling of a room—is not thereby unarchivable. It requires different methods and different thinking about what preservation means. The question of how to capture and archive emotions is not peripheral but central to any archival practice that takes seriously what is lost when only the visual and the textual are deemed to count.

Igwe identifies a cluster of interrelated formal strategies across the symposium’s film and image work: temporal and cultural layering, which is described variously as collage, montage, editing, remixing, sampling. What unites them is the refusal to take the archival image as given. Each of these strategies is a form of intervention, an intercession that opens the image to other temporalities and other readings. The cut, in this account, is not a break or a wound but an opening: a productive rupture that creates space for future imaginaries by refusing the closure proposed by the original.

Critical fabulation from the Saidiya Hartman reference surfaced as one of the most prominent methodological categories across the symposium. It is a practice that combines archival research with speculative and fictional narrative, specifically to address the silences and gaps in regards the lives of marginal subjects in the archive as a significant strand in contemporary practices with archival sources.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts’. “Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism”. vol. 12. no. 2. 2008. pp. 1–14. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.

The concept of the sonic monument connects most directly to Igwe’s own current practice and her encounter during the Covid pandemic through an online talk with the Nigerian sound artist Emeka Ogboh on the themes of sound, space and remembrance. Ogboh spoke about creating a sonic monument to the #EndSARS protests, the 2020 youth uprising in Nigeria against the Special Anti-Robbery Squad. This is an idea of the sonic as a form of collective memory and political witness that broadens the scope of interventions in the archive and how the sonic is constitutive of the archive.

Emeka Ogboh: Nigerian, sound and installation artist working with field recordings, urban memory and political history.

OI: I went to a film festival in Argentina and I didn’t really know much about what happened in the 1970s and 80s and the dictatorship and the kind of disappearances and imprisonment and they took us to this site… people were held and tortured and… the people who were in prison and could hear the sounds of the tournament and it made me think a lot about sounds and space.

Onyeka Igwe visited a site of detention and torture in Buenos Aires in 2022 from the period of Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976–1983), where she was told that prisoners from inside the building could hear the sounds of the 1978 FIFA World Cup (hosted in Argentina). The disjunction between the sonic spectacle of national celebration and the experience of those imprisoned beneath. The subsequent sonic memorial Igwe made for the Nigerian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) is the direct outcome of this experience.

Igwe describes a formative conversation after the completion of a so-called archive with the scholar and filmmaker Ariella Azoulay, who suggested that the film might be about unlearning one’s reverence for archives. It is a proposition Igwe describes as a feeling of being “called out”. The admission is significant because it addresses critical distance as a sense of enchantment. The work of the film was coming to terms with that enchantment, which recognises reverence is a precondition of moving through it.

Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso, 2019.

Is this provocation a useful inquiry? Having traced the extractive logic of archival institutions, having worked through the problems of classification, power and colonial epistemology, the film a so-called archive arrives at a gesture of abandonment. This is presented not as a permanent position but as a moment in a longer trajectory: “this is where I was in 2020”. The question of the counter-archive is not one of reforming the archive but of refusal as potentially a genuine possibility rather than a rhetorical provocation.

In the possibility of refusal, Igwe recognises that while she took a calculated hiatus from working in archives—arriving at a position of refusal—she has recently returned to archives for a new exhibition project. She expressed the proposition: what would a “fantasy archive” look like? Furthermore, there is the issue of the institution and questioning what activates this return. Enjoyment, in a psychoanalytical framework, is not simply pleasure but can be a negative compulsion, an attachment to what one resists. This may be related to Isaac Julien’s writing about the “murky question of our [relationship] to these images” and about a “surplus pleasure” in working with archival material. This return is not resolved; it is held as a question.

For further reading on the “surplus pleasure” and related to ideas of a murky pleasure as Igwe describes her feelings, see Julien, “Undoing the Colonial Archive”.

Against the archive’s tendency to produce a single, authoritative narrative—capital-H History—Igwe asks what it might mean to suffuse an exhibition with a multiplicity of approaches. Not one archival logic but many, in productive tension. She draws on Fred Moten’s figure of “dehiscence” to think about this. Dehiscence, as a biological term, describes the splitting open of a seed pod or surgical wound—it names both rupture and generative opening. For Igwe, dehiscence is not a harmonious plurality but a wound that cannot be closed, and multiplicity in these terms means maintaining the wound within archival structures: creating openings that cannot be reclassified, preserved or sealed back into a single story.
Fred Moten uses the concept of “dehiscence” to describe a kind of rupture or bursting open particularly in relation to blackness, sociality and the limits of enclosure or containment.

Moten, Fred. “Black Op”. PMLA. vol. 123. no. 5. 2008. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2008.123.5.1743.
Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372028.

The closing leads to a range of opening questions: where are the spaces for counter-archives to exist? And through what platforms might they be accessible? What might opacity protect? And at what cost does this come? It is important that to maintain a robust engagement with archives, we cannot resort to singular, classifiable answers but instead need to ensure that we hold the space for an open-endedness of what the archive invites.