(W)archives: archival imaginaries, war, and contemporary art

The elements of archives are not inert but rather subject to change, whether they are incinerated (as in the case of the University of Cape Town’s Jagger Library), or whether the elements pass into hands which are different to that of the “official” archival authority (be the state, or an institution or otherwise). While they are often considered purveyors of empiricism, they have also been subject to artistic engagement, wherein the elements of the archive are reconfigured to produce new meaning. (W)archives is an edited collection that explores the relationship between war, archives, art and the imagination. Shifting between disciplines, the book engages the reciprocity of cultural (and other) production between state, military and civilians, wherein new technologies and new methods of collecting and interpreting information have shaped the very ways in which our imaginations temper our engagements with such information. That is to say: we do not unproblematically absorb the new types of information, but rather our engagements with this type of information tempers our experience of the technologies. Within this, the contributors identify the reproduction of a very old (and colonial) politics of war, imagination and artistic production. While the collection of data in these new ways (through drones, thermal imagery etc.) was led by military interests which are presented as invasive and repressive, the data collected passes into civilian life and moves beyond the control of the military. For instance, the information is acted upon by artists who reconfigure and subvert the meaning of the military-produced warchive, producing new meanings and new modes of viewership and subjectivity.

The book is divided into four sections which vary in terms of both content and genre.

The first, “Archiving War: Spatiotemporal Reconfigurations,” considers the relationship between the state and archive, situating the emergence of the digital archive in military interests. However, the contributors carefully connect this emerging form of archive with civilian life, through engagements with different types of surveillance (McSorley), map-making (Engberg-Pedersen) and the politics of space (Gómez-Moya). Readers might find valuable insights into the historical and political relationship between land, archive and power, and how the emergence of new technologies – in different hands – has altered our experience of space and time.

The book then shifts towards considerations of more tangible forms of data collection, assessing “The Aesthetics of Drone Formations: Counter-archives, Mediations, and Interventions.” The theme of surveillance is explored further, specifically through an analysis of the relationship between information collection and construction through the use of drones. In Heba Amin and Anthony Downey’s contribution, which assesses the imagination produced in Egypt through years of airborne surveillance, the paranoia associated with such forms of surveillance is framed in the absurd.The instance is used by the authors to bring to the fore not so much the irrationality of the reaction to a stork fitted with a tracking device, but more so an imagination tempered by the real experience of wartime surveillance. The point is not merely that new technologies like drones are changing the collection of data, but also that our experiences of this data collection have affected how we imagine even the most mundane interactions.

The third section of the book – “Sensing War: Technologies, Intimacies, and Bodies” – shifts focus towards artistic representations of the relationship between archive and war. Much of the consideration revolves around a critique of the modes of viewership produced by new technologies of image capture. In a powerful essay, editor Daniela Agostinho explores an installation in London using thermographic images. The technology emerged first as a military apparatus but has passed into popular and creative fields, becoming something of a symbol of our present and recent past. Agostinho is critical of the way in which the artwork presents a critique of Western involvement in wars in the Middle East, but itself reproduces the problematic politics of the subjects of the images. The relationship remains of Westerners gazing upon black or brown bodies which are captured simply because they are black or brown bodies. We see in even the most altruistic artistic representations of war from the West the reproduction of a much older politics of race, capture and viewership. Rather than discarding the artwork altogether, Agostinho uses the opportunity to call for new ways of viewing such works – a “affective grammar” (Agostinho, 2020, p. 210). This thought is taken further in the contributions of Sophie Dyer and Oraib Toukan, who respectively consider forms of “mis/seeing” and “disaster tourism.” These critiques are given body in the ensuing contributions which present artworks that subvert the hegemony of the Western gaze in the production of technologically oriented artworks in the twenty-first century. Through the presentations of Aimée Zito Lema and Sofie Lebech, we see the critiques presented by Agostinho, Dyer and Toukan come to life.

The final section of the book is entitled “Evidentiary Aesthetics: Documenting, Witnessing, Redressing,” questioning the nature of archives as proof of something. For the authors of these four chapters, archive is constructed (or constituted) in relation to structure and power. For instance, Ariella Azoulay’s contribution considers the displacement of a Palestinian archive in the face of a powerful Israeli archive of evidence. The section concludes with a consideration of content moderation on YouTube in relation to Syria, bringing to the fore popular sites of public expression and evidence-making and their limitations.

The book is geographically specific, with few studies south of the equator, suggesting that the interests of the contributors are solely with Western powers and their relationship with Latin America and the Middle East. The collection thus reproduces the very geopolitics it seeks to critique. In this, there is a reproduction of the invisibility of the subject as an agent in the archive of their own beings. Alongside this is a (re)production of a world cleaved in two: the hyper-visible global north and the invisible global south, positioning the reader from the global south as a voyeur of an anthology of performance. Readers should be cautious of unproblematically applying the findings of the book to experiences outside the specific geographies of the chapters. Nevertheless, the book is a valuable interrogation of the critical and creative interaction with the complexity of the relationship between archive, art and war in the twenty-first century. Indeed, those of us who lost elements of our research in the Jagger Library fire might find some solace in the appropriation of archival elements exhibited in (W)archives.