Reading Circle (email registration required: malin@archivesites.org  – space for 10 people only)

Artist and volume co-editor Ruth Buchanan will open up the reader Uneven Bodies (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Aotearoa New Zealand, 2021*) by introducing the concept and context of the collection. Uneven Bodies comprises outstanding practitioners rethinking art institution infrastructures from the perspective of the dynamic and contested relationship between the body, power, language and the archive. With the lively familiarity of an editor, Buchanan will delve into the practice, affinities and connections of the authors, and present the specific strategies that they shared and published in Uneven Bodies. Foregrounding the editor’s role in shaping debates in collective and convivial publishing spaces, the Reading Circle will closely read and discuss a selection of excerpts from the reader, including passages by Aotearoa scholar and Decolonizing Methodologies (1999) author Linda Tuhiwai Smith on decolonizing art institutions; Anishinaabe curator Wanda Nanibush on the practice of performing sovereignty in the museum; notes from Taranaki artist WharekhokaSmith on the process of acquisition into collections; and about the Samoa House Library micro-collections that transform standardised methods of cataloguing and archiving.

 The workshop is open to everyone interested in practices of transformation at cultural institutions that begin with the body. Convivial lunch by Archive will be part of this activity. Please write us to register here, and include a few sentences introducing yourself and your practice: malin@archivesites.org

 * Ruth Buchanan, Aileen Burns & Johan Lundh, Hanahiva Rose (Eds). Uneven Bodies (reader). Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Aotearoa New Zealand, 2021.

One-to-one readings (registration on site)

 Ruth Buchanan’s artistic work addresses the contested and dynamic relationship between body, power, language and archive. Her one-to-one readings are gestures of inscription that bring bodies into presence and proximity. Buchanan conducts her readings face to face with visitors, creating an intimate space through poetry. The readings are based on an ongoing engagement with the poet J.C. Sturm (1927–2009), one of the first female Māori writers to have her work published. Sturm addressed the paradoxical situation faced by women in society: while they have more autonomy, their status is perpetually unstable. Buchanan’s feminist gestures challenge these entrenched imbalances, embodying the space of exhibitions while resonating along the resistance voices of the perennial. 

Story and eating figures

The eating figures made of amaranth recall the use of the plant amaranth, meaning in Nahuatl “the smallest giver of life,” whose seeds are one of the most important foodstuffs in Mexico, and it is also an ingredient related to different rituals.  Harvested over thousands of years, amaranth resisted colonial extinction, when it’s use was forbidden by the Spanish due to its importance in indigenous ritualistic practices. Amaranth survived in subversive cultivation, and it is still used to prepare ixiptlahuan, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures that are ritually consumed in Mexico. Following that recipe, Castillo Deball mixes amaranth seeds in nahuatl huahtli with black maguey syrup and, after kneading it, she shapes figures made of that dough. The amaranth resistance makes visible and narratable what keeps speaking to us in the present, linking the struggle for sovereignty with cultural food memory.

In collaboration with Gabriella Kolandra and José Carlos Oscar

Social display and food-sharing

Rebeca Pak’s Bar Somente Hoje is an ephemeral intervention, whose title means “only today bar”. Evoking a present-oriented temporality of one-day and of the here-and-now, it’s a playful spatial strategy that embodies Pak’s research on identity in-transit. Within the program of readings and performances of Crossings, Bar Somente Hoje restages the social space of the ‘boteco,’ a popular bar in Brazil, to intertwine moments of gathering and sharing. Through a social display, Bar Somente Hoje invites us to engage collectively and awake various senses. We are asked to join the low seating arrangements, a modality recovered from Pak’s Korean-Brazilian family reunions, transferred here to subvert the normativity of body politics at institutions, and partake in the offering of the recipe of Supplimchi de bacalhau, from Pak’s Brazilian, Korean and Italian background. On this occasion, Pak collaborates with curator Gabriella Kolandra. Drawing on the practice of popular painters-typists in Brazil, they commissioned a series of posters to the Carioca ‘cartazista’ José Carlos Oscar to announce Bar Somente Hoje to passersby, and reinforce the work’s hospitality and social dimension. In this way, Bar Somente Hoje continues as a fabulation that moves between different diasporic dimensions.