“Preface: The Society of Undutiful Daughters,” in Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice, eds. in Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, Fanny Söderbäck (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), xviii.
Amber Jacobs, “The Potential of Theory: Melanie Klein, Luce Irigaray, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship,” in Hypatia 22, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 175–93.
Sarat Maharaj, “Xeno-Epistemics: Makeshift Kit For Sounding Visual Art As Knowledge Production and the Retinal Regime,” in Documenta11, Plattform 5: Ausstellung (Hatje Cantz 2002), 71–84.
On double consciousness, see W. E. D. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
Braidotti, “Preface: The Society of Undutiful Daughters,” xii.
Derrida: “The archons are first of all the documents’ guardians. They do not only ensure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives. Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect state the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law.” Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (Summer, 1995): 10.
Melly Shum Hates Her Job (1989) is billboard-sized photo-text work by artist Ken Lum installed on the outside of the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. The piece was initially installed in 1990, as part of an exhibition of Ken Lum’s work that marked the opening of the museum. It has hung there ever since; when Lum’s show ended, residents of the neighborhood did not want Melly to leave: “Melly Shum, they said, is us!” Note to the author from Bik Van der Pol, May 8, 2017.
The piece was removed for a short while in 2005, during Lukas Einsele’s exhibition “One Step Beyond” at Witte de With, when Catherine David was director of the museum. Melly was temporarily replaced by a picture of a young minesweeper. One night, an anonymous person posted a message below the image, written across multiple sheets of paper: “Omar hates his job.”
Kathy Kleiman, The Computers: The Remarkable Story of the ENIAC Programmers, 2012, 20 min. It would take fifty years for the stories of the women involved in the development of the first electronic-digital computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), to become public information thanks to Kleiman’s research.
Foucault’s definition of the archive provided an essential vocabulary for a political sequence of Critical Theory that analyzed power relations with the aim of complexifying the “historical a priori”; this definition has remained relevant for curatorial politics, particularly after 1990. See, for example, Okwui Enwezor, “Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument,” Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Steidl/ICP), 10–51.
Michael Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, trans A. M. Sheridan Smith (Routledge, 1972), 146. Italics in original.
Anselm Franke, “Curating Against the Grain: Frontiers, Scripted Spaces, and Groundlessness,” in Thinking under Turbulence, ed. Doreen Mende (HEAD Geneva and Motto Books, 2017), 163f.
Nina Power, “Reading Transdisciplinarily: Sartre and Althusser,” Theory, Culture & Society 32, no. 5–6, Special Issue: Transdisciplinary Problematics (2015): 109–124.
Multiple women have been citied as the originator of this phrase, including Carole Hanisch (in her 1969 essay of the same name) and Robin Morgan (in her introduction to the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful).
See Melinda Cooper, “The Law of the Household: Foucault, Neoliberalism, and the Iranian Revolution,” The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism, eds. Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter (Fordham University Press, 2014), 20–58.
Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s,” in Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches (Crossing Press, 2007), 138.
Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2015), 95.
Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art, (Duke University Press, 2011), 78. Earlier in the book Grosz also writes that “new knowledges” are “weapons, tools, in the struggles of power over what counts as truth, over what functions as useful, over what can be used to create new systems, forces, regimes, and techniques, none of which are indifferent to power” (76).
See Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (Vintage, 1994).
Eleanor Bond, written reflection on “Cosmoville” for Bik Van der Pol’s exhibition WERE IT AS IF.
“Witte de With, of course, was the name giver, and a naval hero. The first years were stormy.” Bik Van der Pol, Cloud, script, 2016.
Written reflection on “South Bronx Hall of Fame,” an exhibition of sculptures by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres held at Witte de With in 1991–92, for Bik Van der Pol’s WERE IT AS IF.
See Bond’s written reflection on “Cosmoville.”
Boris Buden, “The Public Intellectual after History: Remembering Said’s ‘Speaking Truth to Power,” in A Journey of Ideas Across: In Dialog with Edward Said, ed. Adania Shibli (HKW, 2013).
Didi Cheeka, “Reclaiming History, Unveiling Memory Part II,” contribution to the conference Archival Constellations, February 2017, silent green Kulturquartier, Berlin.
Suely Rolnik, Archive Mania (Hatje Cantz, 2012).
Rolnik, Archive Mania.
Rotterdam in the 1980s and ’90s was also energized by the activities of artist-run spaces (such as residency programs), attracting a lot of artists to the city. The first edition of Manifesta, the travelling European biennial, took place in Rotterdam in 1996. But this energy dissipated when the city government tried to tap into it in order to revitalize the institutional art sector. The 2001 event “Cultural Capital of Europe,” held in Rotterdam, marked this decline. Then in 2002, the right-wing populist politician Pim Fortuyn was murdered in Rotterdam. This led to the election of a majority right-wing city council in Rotterdam, which until then had been dominated by the socialist party for decades.
Hito Steyerl, “The Institution of Critique,” eipcp, January 2006 →.
Rolnik, Archive Mania.
This text is a revised version of “Archival Metabolism: Toward a Twenty-First-Century Archive theory without Theory,” in WERE IT AS IF: Beyond An Institution That Is, eds. Defne Ayas and Bik Van der Pol (Witte de With Center, 2017). Thanks to Bik Van der Pol and Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy for granting permission to reprint parts of the text. The concepts of “archival metabolism” and the “undutiful daughter” emerged from several collaborative curatorial projects I have participated in since 2008; these projects have involved noninstitutional archives, especially from East Germany, Palestine, and Non-Aligned countries.