Beskrivelse
How does one memorialize an event that is still unfolding, asks Christina Sharpe in her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), in which she proposes the term “wake work” as a mode of engaging with the “afterlife of slavery” (Hartman, 1997), the ongoing effects of the transatlantic enslavement trade in contemporary life. In 2017, Denmark commemorated the centennial of the sale of its former colonial territories in the Caribbean known as the Danish West Indies, known today as the US Virgin Islands. Upon this occasion, several Danish institutions digitised and publicly released their archival records from the colonial period, which raised the temporal question formulated by Christina Sharpe: how to encounter the archive of an event that is still unfolding? Archives often enact temporal closures, ensuring that the past is perceived as different from the present. Yet, as image theory has demonstrated, images can produce effects throughout times, operating not only as agents of colonial durability (Stoler, 2016), carrying over the violence of colonial times to the present, but also as critical sites of recognition of past and present injustice, enabling different futurities (Campt, 2017). With examples from the photographic archives of Danish colonialism, as well as artistic practices that critically engage with it, this presentation will interrogate the temporalities of the colonial archive through the notion of “archival encounter”, a mode of engagement with the colonial archive that foregrounds the affective relations established between images and viewing communities across times. Drawing on feminist and decolonial theories of the archive, this presentation will cast light on the ethics of seeing and showing colonial images, and suggest that the temporality of the archival encounter, juxtaposing past, present and future, demands a critical rethinking of the colonial archive premised on an ethics of care.| Periode | 8 nov. 2018 → 9 nov. 2018 |
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| Sted for afholdelse | Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Portugal |
| Grad af anerkendelse | International |