Sven Christian [SC]: As I’m sure you’re aware, today is the Day of Reconciliation, an opportunity for us to remember and come to terms with our troubled past, one that is filled with the trauma of displacement, dehumanisation, oppression, and guilt. When we think about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established after the abolition of apartheid in 1994, whose mandate was to bear witness to, record, and in some cases grant amnesty to the perpetrators of crimes relating to human rights violations, we can begin to recognise the significance of the archive, not only as a site for reconciliation, but as a crucial repository to account for the intentional silencing and subsequent erasure of voices, and as a site through which to resuscitate collective memory and healing. To quote from Saleh Najafi’s paper in Pages, entitled “Hope Against Hope”:

Trauma (or more precisely the traumatic core of every event) is exactly what one is unable to remember and, as Freud has demonstrated, is nevertheless condemned to repeat. That is, one is condemned to repeat the inability to recollect, to make the unmemorable a part of one’s symbolic narrative.

It is this inability to remember what is lost, and more specifically, “to redeem the potentials and hopes of the past, the lost causes and failures within all the past processes of emancipation” that we are hear to talk about today. Opening up the discussion to the panelists, Babak if you could please talk us through the origins of your work, and the motivation behind Pages?

Babak Afrassiabi [BA]: The magazine is directly connected to our artistic practices, which indirectly inform the themes of each issue. “When Historical,” the issue that you were quoting from, was a direct consequence of the research that we were doing. It was informed by the political situation and the protests in Iran at the time. The article that you were quoting from by Saleh Najafi was written as a response to that. He reflects on the Iranian revolution from 1979, as well as Foucault’s reading and projection onto that revolution.

We began Pages as a platform for ourselves to do collaborative research that could be conducted parallel to our work. We wanted to create a space that was independent from the spaces of contemporary art that we as artists work in. Because it is a bilingual magazine, it is also a kind of liminal space; functioning between languages, between spaces. In that sense, it has been very important for us to generate work in collaboration with people in order to instigate other ways of thinking about practices, histories, language, and so on.

SC: Tazneem and Ashley, your work is also largely research-based. How did you begin working with the archive and how has that influenced your practice?

Tazneem Wentzel [TW]: I’ve always worked with the archive, even as a child. The family photographs underneath your bed or parents’ cupboard — those are archives that I would always go back to. They were my first entry into history. My background is in anthropology and history, but my approach to research has largely been influenced by the people I work with. Through my experiences at the District Six Museum I’ve learnt to accept that there is a gap within the archive. You will never know everything. How do you work within that gap? Where can you look to find remnants of your historical background? Food has become one of those avenues for me. Particularly fast-food. It’s a social thing. It brings people together. Looking at the history of the very ordinary is where I find myself at the moment.

Ashley Walters [AW]: I think my practice also started from a gap in the archive; looking at my own home, where I grew up, the community itself and the people that live there. There is very little access to information about these spaces. Where did they come from? Why is it that I live here and not near the mountain? Why is the community designed in a certain way?

Some of that information doesn’t exist. Perhaps it was destroyed. There are many archives that haven’t been taken care of — physical archives, printed documentation... I’m not a documentary photographer. I make work around my personal experience of communities. The projects that I’ve worked on are often done over long periods of time. I work in a place for a couple years, go back, see change, and then show that change, based on my experience. I’m showing things that happen in communities that people who live outside of don’t often have access to. I’m showing it in other communities.

To date I’ve done work in Uitsig (which is where I grew up) and Woodstock (which will be published soon). Making work in areas that I have lived in makes sense because I have personal experiences within these communities and can respond.

SC: There’s a lot of subjectivity that comes with framing something. If we take it back to the publication of Pages, for example, each iteration has a different theme. We’ve spoken a bit about “When Historical,” which is the eighth issue, but perhaps you could tell us more about the other issues?

BA: “Seep” speaks directly to two existing archives. One was the archive of British Petroleum (BP). It shows documentation of when oil was first found in the Middle East by this British oil company. At the time it was called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The other archive was the collection of western modern art in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

The BP archive is the largest existing record of modernisation in that region. The whole process of excavation, modernisation, and the building of the city is meticulously documented. But, like many colonial archives, it did not present the full story. When you look at how archives are generally produced, what is often missing is the labour behind them. In this case it was the factory worker. In 1953 the company had to evacuate the country because of the nationalisation of oil. A few years prior to that, they started to produce photographs that documented the facilities of the factories, the schools, and the one university that they built in South-Western Iran. They also documented the workers and students who were learning the trade and would end up working in factories. Those photographs were often staged. They represented an almost fictional narrative about the region.

Although the factory was finally closed down, the story of that archive continued into the collection of western modern art at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. It continued that whole process of modernisation right through to 1978. At the time the government had built the first museum of contemporary art in Iran and had acquired what was, at the time, the largest collection of Western art outside of Europe, the majority of which is American modern art, from Jackson Pollock to Andy Warhol.

After the revolution of 1979 the whole collection was taken down into the cellar and wasn’t allowed to be exhibited for the next twenty years, because it was considered to represent so-called ‘western ideology’. In both the project and the magazine we look at the connections between the BP archive and the collection, particularly their misrepresentation of the historical context. This provides an opportunity for us to look towards another narrative of modernity, or another narrative of the experience of modernity in Iran. We consider the collection becoming contemporary only after it was withdrawn and not exhibited. In its absence, the archive actually becomes associated with the historical context — by being closed off or taken away.

Official archives are often produced around material manipulations. In this case the manipulation of raw petroleum instigated the archive. So it is through an understanding of these manipulations that archives are also connected to geographies and to ecologies. This was at the core of “Seep.”

SC: Archives are inevitably select. The testaments in the Bible also act as a kind of archive. Social media channels like Facebook and the data that is being collected and sold reminds us that archives often function within political spheres. Tazneem, perhaps you could talk us through the politics of archiving in relation to your own work?

TW: The politics of archiving in South Africa is complex. People of colour in South Africa were categorised out of that history. Your representation in the museum is in the form of a diorama. If you look at what gets the privilege of being archived and stored, there is an unequal distribution of which histories are important enough to be housed within an air-conditioned institution. Then there are other archives that refuse to be housed in storerooms — archives that people live and practice every day. On the one hand our collections have been historically skewed toward the colonial/apartheid archive. The one thing the colonisers did well is that they documented their colonisation very well. You have these archives of oppression, but how do you engage with them? It’s interesting to look at these archives now, as well as alternative archives, and see how they do or don’t speak to each other.

SC: In an interview with the U.S-based media historian Norman Klein, published in “When Historical,” you [Babak] write that “the archives of our time have become sites for re-archiving and of reproducing documents. For example, electronic archives such as Youtube or Facebook, where a single document is posted and reposted time and again through a process of cut-and-paste. If archives are incomplete, it is no longer because of the documents that did not survive the passing of time, but of what is still to be inserted or re-invented into them.” What effect do you think this kind of flexibility will have on the importance of the archive going forward? How do we begin to draw meaning from something that appears to have no centre?

BA: Ten years ago, and still today, there was this discussion going around that archives need to be centralised. Capitalism is investing in these central structures. Every month we see museums and libraries putting their material online. You hear big headlines of maps or whole museum collections being digitised and made available online. The more accessible they become online, the more they loose their connection with history. The historical connotations that these objects might have had at one point become an actualisation of data; information that is consumable, like any other object.

We basically cut, paste, and repost them. What is always missing from these archives is the historical labour that goes into producing them. Perhaps what is important is to think about these archives in relation to location. To go back to the project Seep, what was interesting was going back to where these archives were produced. Often those housed in libraries or institutions have a location elsewhere. The actual location where the archive was produced has gone through a totally different historical and political trajectory to the one it is housed in. If you think about it, archives are never really a closed space. South-West Iran has experienced many phases of war. Whether you like it or not, they have relationships with these places, with these other histories. It is important that these are re-channeled back into the archive so that it becomes more permeable, more porous. It’s only then that we can begin to think about the archive as a site for political struggle or negotiation.

SC: In that same interview, Klein writes that in fiction, “Back story is essential to the ambience of reading. It is the unspoken that came before… In tragedies set in post-war situations, like the women of Troy (Euripides), the characters reenact the unspoken, the lost decade when war stole their lives. But they must reenact the unspoken within a single day. They are essentially archiving dramatically. They are forced to condense meaning, one might say, only enough memory to keep the ghost of their dead husbands alive, but not too much to bear. They must archive selectively.”

I think here about the work that you have done, both within the gallery or museum context, as well as the public domain. How have people responded to works that you’ve displayed publicly, especially those that aren’t familiar with your work? Do you think there is some kind of innate, collective understanding — do people automatically ‘get it’?

AW: To respond to what you’re saying now, and to the question about the digitisation of the archive: on the one hand archives are being seen, which is a good thing. It’s visible to a larger audience that can then go back to the physical archive. Looking at archives that are very specific, whether through location, history, or material value—like oil, geography, or development—often these archives are not accessible to the public. This may come down to money. It costs a lot to have a well controlled environment where you can keep printed material, otherwise archives are poorly maintained. It’s becoming more difficult to take care of physical archives. We don’t have the conditions to do that. It’s the same with digital. If you copy a digital file again and again and again it deteriorates. It’s just the nature of the platforms that we are using.

If I compare photographs I took years ago to the ones I took recently—those raw files to the files that I’m producing now—there’s a huge gap between the copy and the source material. That’s the nature of technology. You have to copy it onto new devices before the files become obsolete. You have floppy disks, CDs, flash storage, but at some point your computers are all going to deteriorate or break. You need the physical material prints too. You need to think ahead.

With regards to the context of exhibition, my own practice is often centred around a specific location. I photograph and make work that is exhibited in a gallery space, which is accessible to a specific audience, but I’m also making work that is accessible to the general public. We once had a group exhibition in a train station, where lots of commuters travel on a daily basis. When you start having conversations around the work there is a different appreciation for the image. In a gallery you say “This is an artwork”. The moment you put it in the public it’s a completely different thing.

The one day I was standing next to one of my works. I had a conversation with some of the commuters, and they were trying to figure out what they were looking at. They’re familiar with the image because it is a space that they themselves have seen—they live nearby—but what is the point of it? Is it advertising? On social media everyone has a personal archive. The moment you join Facebook, information about where you live, what you do on a daily basis, your interests, where you spend... That is an archive. You’re documenting something that becomes a database, becomes information, becomes commodity.

TW: We’ve also had a number of interesting interactions in public space. I prefer to work there. It’s a much more interesting context. In much of our work as Burning Museum, the archive relates directly to the place. The imagery that we used previously was from the Vankalka archive in Greschop. People wanted to have their portrait taken. Greschop is in District Six. When we put these images up there people generally recognise them, it’s familiar. I also find the texture of public wall space a lot more interesting than the gallery space. You have to add a lot to make it speak to an audience that doesn’t necessarily understand its attachment to particular archives. In public spaces closer to District Six and Woodstock, the portraits that we use make a lot more sense. When you put up a portrait or a landscape from District Six, near to District Six, there is a lot of nostalgia and familiarity. People know those places. For me it’s almost like authoring public space, puncturing it with little memories to catch people’s attention, even if it’s just for a second. It’s a reminder that you do belong in this place, that you do have a history. Even if it’s not portrayed in institutions, even if it’s out of history, even if it’s just for two days — you do belong here. We’re trying to figure out our relationship with place and why we are on the periphery. I guess it’s that longing to be closer to the mountain, this mother city.

SC: I wanted to ask, because you mentioned something that relates to what Ashley was saying about technology and the archive always being in a constant state of renewal, if you could tell us more about your current research at UWC?

TW: For my Masters I have to write a thesis, and in the beginning I had no idea what I was going to do. I wasn’t going to write about something that I had no emotional attachment to. Through my courses I started thinking about where else I could look for an archive, places of history. With Burning Museum we had already been looking under the cupboard, on top of it, along the train lines, in museums… I figured it was time to start looking in the kitchen. I realised that I grew up with these things, I’ve been surrounded by them. Sometimes it’s so obvious, so normal to you that you miss them. So I started thinking about food within a South African context, bread specifically. That’s my masters at the moment — bread, gatsbys…

SC: To go back to that interview again, there’s a part where Norman Klein writes that with official records, “We are given a construction, but allowed to also see the bones of the house. As one researches through a collection, a database, there is always a haunted ideology, of course. What is left out tells us more than what is included. No matter how complete the archive may seem, it is partial. It may seem thorough, but that may be in order to hide something more important. Rarely does a researcher find the heart of a matter in a collection. More likely, the heart has been consumed or partially removed. Otherwise, the collection would not have survived. It is like a plate of food after it has been eaten. We study the plate for signs of what was eaten.” In a very direct way I read that and began thinking about your practice, the archive as a verb, something that can be consumed and digested. Which brings us back to the conversation about trauma and the archive as a place invested with hope, desire…

TW: I don’t know if this is a good example, but around the 50s, 60s, and 70s you’d see the manipulation of recipe books written by predominantly white Afrikaners. These recipes were largely Cape Malay recipes. The authors had ‘collected’ them from cooks in Cape Town. These books are now in our libraries, but the recipe itself… These women would deliberately give incorrect portions of spices or leave out important flavours that make or break the dish. So within food there are also ways that we’ve subverted the dominant impulse to collect, to document. You won’t find that recipe in the library. You have to go find it somewhere else. You have to go taste, experience the dishes and how people actually make them. My point being that people have been subverting through food for a long time. It’s just that sometimes we forget how to read. We forget that eating is another form of reading history.

Audience: I have a question regarding institutional archives and something that happened at Stellenbosch last year. During the student protests I was working at the library and they closed it off because of the protests. I remember some of the students shouting “We want to burn the Afrikaner section of the university’s library”. That is the archival section, where the first editions of certain laws are kept in air-tight conditions. I said to the students, “I think you should reconsider your protest action, because you’re burning the ammunition with which you want to decolonise the university — this is where everything lies that you’re fighting against”. But the students don’t have access to it. It’s hidden away. This whole thing about when you digitise an archive you loose this connection to history, or the historical connection… There is this stark disparity between what the students have access to and what they should have access to…

TW: I’ve been in that section of Stellenbosch library, and you know, people are angry. They have every right to be. But when I say burn the archive, there are different ways of burning. I’m talking about ideologically burning an archive. In the long run that’s a lot more disruptive than just burning something. The bottom line is that this is what we have — so I’m not going to agree with the diorama of bones still being kept in museums, but it’s a challenge that we need to think about creatively. We need to re-imagine how we can engage with our history on our own terms.

Audience: Perhaps the reason why protesting students in Stellenbosch wanted to burn down a particular archive was because they don’t understand their stake in the archive, and how they have ownership of it. Perhaps that’s why Burning Museum’s work is so successful — people understand their stake in the work. It’s been taken into a public domain and not inside an organisation, which can be quite intimidating. In these scenarios artists like Ashley and Tazneem become the people who create historical fiction in order to translate data for the public so that it becomes more comprehensible. I believe it’s the museum’s responsibility to allow such artists increased access to those archives beyond just showing the work.

SC: Babak from your knowledge of the revolution in Iran, have there been similar incidents? I went to an exhibition opening at Goodman Gallery (Cape Town) a while back by Samson Kambalu. He was giving a walkabout, and one of the things that he said was that when it comes to decolonisation, it’s important for us to think about what kind of future we have in mind post-decolonisation. Can you give us your thoughts on this in relation to the Iranian revolution?

BA: As we understand it, an archive is a product of the western imagination, something that is produced parallel to the history of colonisation. The problem is that these archives are seen as the only valuable and genuine entry or material that links us to history. But the important thing is to look at it as a political study and the possibility of linking that history to a critical, ideal future. In Saleh Najafi’s ‘Hope Against Hope’ he talks about investing the archive with other desires, other than the kind of desires that initially generated those archives. Maybe this is what Tazneem was saying—that there are other ways of burning an archive. Even the idea of burning comes out of a desire for difference. It’s about re-channelling that desire for a different future. It means connecting that colonial past first to the present. Those archives exist, we are living with them, so it’s not only a channel that links us to the past but also to the future.

It’s also important in this discussion of the archive as a political study to think about how our relationship with archives is changing. We as humans are becoming redundant to the archive. As Ashley was saying, the mediums for archiving are becoming obsolete. In addition, I think that we as subjects are also becoming redundant, we are becoming obsolete to the archive.

I’m bringing this up as a kind of political question, but it’s important when we think about archives to think about how they function beyond us; how more and more they are existing and accumulating outside of us. Our role is becoming more and more passive. We are simply recirculating this material and accumulating more and more of it, circulating data to circulate value, basically. How are we going to deal with this? This is a new form of colonisation. Colonisation did not only happen in the 19th century, it is still happening. If we want to talk about these archives that link us to history we should think within our current context and how we relate to archives.

AW: I find it interesting that we have this need to document what we do in order to prove our existence. We do it in a way where we try to compete. With my practice I try to go against the stereotype, to show the things that we aren’t familiar with. If I photograph an area that’s known for its violence, I try to show that there is another side to it as well, that it’s a lot more complex. Even just photographing a space in a different light—literally, photographing it at night; or photographing the traces of a protest, where you see the after effect of it — reconciliation, repair, the coming together and the celebration. It’s not just the crime and the violence. There’s also the family, the home. It’s about looking at the everyday in a new way. Acknowledging the value in our own backyard. We look at the people next to us, the trends they’re setting, and we forget about our own histories, our own cultures. We’re becoming more globalised, which is not a bad thing, but we forget about our traditions.

Audience: I read some of the comments online when the museum opened, and there were a lot of questions about the kind of work you exhibit and why. What becomes important and how do you deal with the politics surrounding that? Who decides what becomes important to a collection?

AW: I actually think we decide who we should pay attention to, as a collective. If you look at Kim Kardashian, at famous pop-stars — we as people that consume popular culture decide who should be popular. We live our lives on social media, on the internet. We put more value in that than we do our daily interactions. People have more Facebook friends than they have actual friends. I think we are partly responsible for that.

Mark Coetzee: I think it’s very important that I respond here, because Sven, I think you made a slight error when you started your talk. You said that this museum was founded on a private collection which is in fact inaccurate. This museum was founded on a mission which was established by a large group of people. A private collection was one of the components that was contributed to establishing a public museum. I think perhaps there’s been a lot of misunderstanding around how the collection of the museum and the exhibition strategy is built. For anybody that’s interested there is in fact an exhibition and collection strategy which defines very strongly that we will follow the artists and the conversations that they are having, and in fact not take a rigid acquisition policy with regards to things that last forever, or specific artists of fame or establishment. You’ll find that the museum has made a very strong commitment to “if about us, not without us;” to young voices that have not been endorsed by a system.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about the role that the museum will play now and into the future when it comes to this. We’ve been very public about the fact that we want to be contrary, non-archival — that we’re not even interested in things that stand the test of time. We’re only interested in things that stand the test of this time. So it’s a commitment to a whole new generation of artists, new voices, new practices, and new ways of seeing. We’ve gone to great lengths not to define it, because that gives us the possibility to be open, to be disrupted, to be changed, to be contradicted, and for us as a group to respond to what the responses to this place are.

Most public museums have policies in place around ‘what you collect, what you don’t collect.’ We’ve gone to great lengths to avoid those restrictive policies. The curators are a very young generation. I think it’s very important for me to articulate that from the group, because I think there is a lot of misunderstanding as to, “why don’t we as an institution define our collective strategy, why don’t we as an institution define our exhibition strategy?” Because the minute you define it you restrict yourself and you become prescriptive. The whole point was not to do that.

Audience: Do you believe that the quality of our personal archives are diminishing because of technology? On my phone I often receive a message that says ‘storage full.’ I feel that we’re constantly having to filter and edit what we keep. The scary thought is that our personal archives will one day become public. The fact that we’re constantly having to filter and prioritise what we’re keeping long term — it’s scary to think that eventually its going be an archive that is so filtered and subjective. We’re always having to keep up with new technological developments in order to keep our archives prevalent. It’s scary to think that one day we might loose a lot of information…

AW: We produce about 25 billion gigabytes of data everyday; photographs, videos… That comes with using the kind of technology that we have access to now. We have to migrate information to new devices. It’s a concern that I share. When I produce work for my own archive most of it is digital. When I take a photograph I have a main drive, a computer, and a backup that I keep in a different location, but it adds up. The moment you have to copy that information onto a new device it becomes more expensive. You actually have to edit down. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. If you think about our information existing where more people have access to it, I think it’s important that we do actually distill information that is more valuable to us, so that we put less information out about our personal lives.

Audience: Earlier one of you said that the archive as we know it started within western ideology. I’d like to challenge that, because I know that the African continent has had archives for centuries. There is a form of poetry, for example, that has existed for hundreds of years, where certain young men have to learn their history and learn how to recant it over time. With each generation more and more prose is added to their poetry. Then we had things like cloth and rock painting. Music is also an archive. If you it you’ll notice codes, signs, and stories, memories and imaginations, things for the future. Hair braiding is an archive. You can learn a lot from looking at the history of hair, and Africa is rich in oral tradition. Just because there has been a systematic erasure through colonisation and other elements, doesn’t mean that archives did not exist on the African continent. Because of colonisation our histories are entangled, we can’t separate ourselves and we can’t go back to a precolonial moment—whatever that was. A lot of authors have spoken about how all history is fictional anyway. We can look for authenticity, but as we look for it—and for new truths—we should remember that all history is fiction.

There was also mention of the individual archive, but the idea of the individual is quite new to many cultures. Sometimes there is a community archive which is higher on the hierarchy than the individual one.

BA: When I spoke about archives being a western invention, I was really talking about archives as an institution — as a place where objects are held as value, whether economic or political. Obviously all cultures have their own traditions where cultural meaning is preserved or passed on. My question than is, what is the purpose of calling that an archive? What kind of added value do we give to those traditions that exist in various cultures when we call them archives?

To go back to one of the other comments briefly, to the anxiety of loosing connection with one’s individual archives — your photos or messages on your phone, where you run out of space and have to constantly delete them… By the time you’re (god forbid) dead, there’s only information about the last five years of your life. So you’ve only lived five minutes… This anxiety comes with the technology and this pressure that is constantly put on us to have to archive and preserve information. This is what I meant earlier on by saying that archives are becoming more and more detached from us. We are becoming more of an instigator but we are actually loosing our direct connection with those archives. Perhaps this is the symptom of our times, a vicious circle. What I find interesting in those traditions is the direct relationship with the body; as a community, as an individual, as flesh that is constantly being lost. Maybe this is something that we have to think about when we’re talking about archives. It’s what I liked about Tazneem’s idea of food as an archive, because it has an immediate relationship with the body, digestion. It’s not only a trace. We no longer talk about a trace but an immediate interaction between us, the body, and an object.