Bamako (2006) dir. Abderrahmane Sissako

The storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work—the rural, the maritime, and the urban—is itself an artisan form of communication, as it were. It does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.

–Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”

I am leading a workshop on Friday, March 11, 2011 called “Just Stories: Storytelling and the Imagination of Environmental Justice.” It is part of the 10th Annual Nature, Ecology Society Conference, to be held here in New York. If you’re in New York on March 12th, please stop by. It’s FREE, but you should register here.

Hi Adeola. I’m curious how you think about your archiving practices in relation to your archiving (analysis? retrieval?)… I know in your work you are more focused on studying rather than creating archives. But you do create them, so I’m wondering how the 2 activities relate for you. Is one more personal and the other more academic? Or can there be such a distinction for you? What do you think Benjamin was doing with the Arcades project?

This was a great question, because it forced me to think carefully and articulate my approach to archiving. Here is my answer:

I don’t work on “the archive”, per se, because I think that it is too fetishized as an object. I am interested in “archiving” as an everyday practice that has been part of modern life, for many people (anyone associated with a state, in one way or another) and today, it is THE modus operandus for most people who live in the world of electronic devices–from TV watchers, to phone callers, and email senders.

Right now, as I write I am engaging in an archival practice. To me this is more than simply creating an archive that someone can retrieve. I take a lot of inspiration from Benjamin’s arcades project, and many of his writings are part of my “top shelf.” I don’t want to make the comment TOO long, so here is a link to my blog, where I discuss Benjamin a little:
http://archivingthecity.com/2009/01/14/one-day-sculpture/

You will see that Benjamin is very interested in trash, debris, what as been discarded. Why? Not only because it needs to be retrieved and saved (the Arcades project was as much about his life in Paris, as anything else. It is far from a library, or national archive, or institutional archive), or worked with in any conventional way, but because looking at the trash–dumpster diving–was a way to re-train our historical senses, to begin to see how the past is never really gone, and does not necessarily need to be “retrieved” because it never actually left. The Arcades project is not conventional history, or even conventional archiving, in any sense. It is not about creating narratives. I think it is about training oneself as a researcher to do what, in one’s time seems odd, challenging, difficult or even embarassing. What is today’s equivalence of (academic) dumpster diving?

I really like Agnes Varda’s film: The Gleaners and I. It literally takes up dumpster diving as a practice that spans a variety of fields and life syles, and connects it to her film-making practice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKgjjEJvMbM

So this brings me back to my statement in class about not wanting to create archives. I meant that I don’t see a need to create archives in any sense of consciously collecting the histories of others for instrumental purposes. We already create archives all the time. Almost everyone does. So for me, the question is: What is this everyday practice of creating archives doing to our senses of who we are, as people, citizens, neighbors? What is it doing to the way we see the world? This is key, because I think how we see the world, and who we think we are, is the basis of how we engage politically with the world.

What happens when everyone, from old people, in the Bronx to kids in Bed Stuy is already an archivist? What type of project does that mean I need to do, or we need to do? Do we need to create another archive as a goal? If so, what kind of archive do we need to make? Something that will end up in the library of congress, like StoryCorps?

http://storycorps.org/record-your-story/

Or something that is more about “dumpster diving” in some way? Or something else?

These are all big questions for me, especially because we, as academics, are part of a state institution, are funded (and applying for funding) from state instituions, and are planning to work with state institutions, and produce state-sanctioned knowledge about others.

(Ethically, my orientation is towards studying this knowledge production process itself. If we are part of the state, no matter our good intentions, we have to ask: while we watch the others, who is watching us? I certainly don’t like to think of myself as part of the state, but I know everytime I enter into the CUNY building, everytime I sit in the classroom, I am a state certified, run and operated educational system. I think this means something)

So when we make our state-initiated and state-sponsored archive, what should it be? What is the best, most creative way to address this world in which everyone is already an archivist?

So I send the question back to you!

;-]

Adeola

On 14 december, 2009, on Stout Street, between Lambton Quay and Ballance Street, in the center of Wellington, New Zealand, there was a pile of rubbish blockading the entire road and making the street impassable for cars, pedestrians and cyclists. This impromptu blockade was a “One Day Sculpture” called Journee des Barricades by British artists, Heather and Ivan Morison. According to the artists’ statement:

Car wrecks, discarded furniture and other urban detritus barricaded a central city street in Wellington, New Zealand on Sunday 14th December 2008.
The temporary public artwork entitled Journée des barricades acts as a rupture in the everyday comings and goings of the city. In its barricade form, the sculpture might suggest associations with the history of political actions and social unrest, but as a collection of discarded consumer products it may also bring to mind questions about our environmental and economic future.

This street art in Wellington looks eerily like the streets of Naples looked last year (though probably not as smelly, and certainly not for the sake of art).

This artists’ collection of urban detritus also reminds me of the work of Walter Benjamin, especially the Arcades Project.

Benjamin’s project involved collecting things, books, pamphlets, scraps and quote related to the bourgeois transformation of Paris during the Second Empire (mid-late 1800s). One of his goals was:

To educate the image-making medium within us, raising it to a stereoscopic and dimensional seeing into the depths of historical shadows.

I think this means that he wanted “us” to become sensitive to the affective images of our everyday lives, to open ourselves to another kind of “seeing”–a seeing that would engage us deeply in our time, our space through intense connection with the “past.” A way of seeing that what we think is “gone” is always with us, in the shadows.

Benjamin had an interesting method for this daunting project. The name he gave this method was “literary montage.”

I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse–these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.

Making something with refuse, detritus, trash, rubbish, was Benjamin’s way to help us see better. This was his archival practice, his archive of the city.

Slavoj Zizek, in the film Examined Life (2008), takes us one step further, asking us to actually love our trash: