Do you think it’s a little bit ironic to reflect on sustainability in a digital environment? Like, let’s explore the devastating ongoing effects that humans are having on the planet while immersing ourselves in the technologies that rely on high energy consumption. Also, let’s arrange an in-person residency that will most likely require the use of flights. While these are broad sentiments that don't take into consideration specificities, maybe these assumptions can provide additional questions to guide us from August to December as we embark on a remote and in-person hybrid arts residency focusing on race and the environment, curated by Scarborough Museums and Galleries. This commission is part of From Local to Global and has as its starting point the aim to reappraise the colonial collection of Colonel James Harrison (1857-1923) who undertook expeditions to Africa, Asia and South America and accumulated a wide range of animal trophies, diaries, gramophone discs and photographs. A haunting collection documenting a wide range of abuse; from hunting species that are now extinct or endangered to conducting anthropometric exercises on indigenous peoples. 

Are we further centering the white gaze by working with this collection? Are we losing sight of contemporary voices and possible futures by placing so much attention on the past? Do we need to see beginnings to shift directions? Does archival excitement from institutions function as a form of coloniality? How does this process centre institutions as gatekeepers? What invisible rules and power structures shape the political context in which we gain access and knowledge from these materials? How can a consideration of ethics and our positionality inform our practice? How can we talk about human rights, love, care and healing with such violent content?

These broad and initial questions have helped shape one aspect of our approach; that the decolonisation of archives is an ongoing and multifaceted process that encourages contemporary reflections on historical narratives while questioning the structures that are now generating and disseminating knowledge. As we gain a greater understanding of the local and wider context, we want to build on and contribute to existing initiatives and to experiment with artivist actions that could help tease out some of these reflections. Hopefully by the end of the residency we’ll be able to come back with some processes and responses to these questions. 

Centre, periphery or hybrid: positioning the James Harrison collection

Mary Stetson Clarke married James Harrison in 1910 and was also a big-game hunter. She was instrumental in safeguarding his - or maybe ‘their’ - collection after his death in 1923. In 1924 one Yorkshire media outlet described it as “the largest collection of its kind in the world”, although this statement is questionable it nevertheless describes the high value it had at that time. Mary Harrison considered making a donation to the South Kensington Museum - now the Victoria and Albert Museum - but decided against it due to acquisition conditions. She made an offer to Hull which was rejected and the collection ended up being housed in a purpose-built exhibition room in Scarborough’s first free public library that was constructed in the late 1920s. The collection was rehoused in 1948 to make space for a small performing arts venue. The collection wasn’t considered of high value, paperwork was inconsistent and objects went missing after the transfer from the library to the Woodend Museum of Natural History. This came to light dramatically in the early 2000s when a huge pile of rotting and asbestos-filled taxidermy from the collection was found in the basement behind a bricked-up door. Could this be a good metaphor for our decades-long collective amnesia towards the underbelly of imperial expansion and national pride? This part of the collection is now presumably incinerated and/or buried deeper underground at an unknown - probably somewhere abroad - landfill site. This happened when the Woodend building was renovated and converted into the Creative Industries Centre. 

The collection has passed through various cycles of attention and neglect. It has stirred curiosity and excitement for local residents, attracted tourists and been used as an educational tool. It’s now under the ownership of the Scarborough Museums and Galleries and has recently been scrutinised by historians. This new awareness places these objects in historical time while confronting local, national and global narratives. 

How does this public institutional positioning and recent reappraisal affect accessibility and knowledge acquisition? What possibilities are there for further democratic and collective decision-making processes? What stories can we share to understand lessons learnt from the past? What can we make visible for future generations?

Archives as bodies

It’s somewhat confusing that the collection is considered a ‘collection’. In our preparatory discussions we’ve naturally and unconsciously referred to the collection as an ‘archive’. There’s a strong argument that some objects - such as the Ngulu Sword used by the Bantu peoples - could be considered an artefact in a traditional ethnographic collection, yet the vast majority of materials - handwritten diaries and photographs - are of little artistic, but growing cultural value and as a group have more significance as a personal archive recording the life of James Harrison. This wealth of documentary materials builds context and enables us to gain greater knowledge of the artefacts. It’s this part of the collection and discourses around archives - as opposed to aesthetic and fetishistic responses to ethnographic collections - that aligns closer to our interests and intentions as we work with these materials. 

The word ‘archive’ originates from the Greek ‘arkheion’, referring to a house, dwelling, residence or public building. ‘Arkhē’ means ‘government’, but also ‘commencement’. This second meaning is reinforced by the verbal noun ‘arkhein’ meaning ‘beginning, origin’. This was before ‘archive’ was used in English in the 17th century to describe a place for public records and historical documents.

Archives are never faithful to reality nor totally representative of it, but they play their part in constructing this reality, yet offering differences and alternatives. The organisation of the archive is neither objective nor subjective but a synthesis between the receiver and the received that is always unstable, always at play, always moving, always creating a future.

Archives are often re-organised, filtered and instrumentalized for supporting discourses shaped by foundational narratives of modern nation states. As Derrida states, There’s a parallel with psychoanalysis; our desire to recover memories and reimagine moments of inception, beginnings and origins which we believe might be some kind of truth. Working with archives also always means a positioning. In choosing what gets stored, how and where, and who gets access, the archive can be a source of power. We exercise power while working with and transforming the archive. We navigate through our own knowledge and the stored knowledge, our own marks and the marks and absences of those who are memorised in the archive. Therefore we are imagining a space between, what is written, and what is repressed and what we don`t know. Why do we psychoanalyse to spark repressed or forgotten thoughts that may hinder, restrict or hurt? Could it be interesting to think of this archive as a metaphorical body, inanimate object or architectural structure? Possibly an evolving being with an origin story - that was born, passes through stages of life and will inevitably die - that has agency as it interacts with ecosystems.

Digital archiving

The wide digital circulation of documents contribute to their formation as discrete monuments. Text, images and objects are often isolated from folders and photographed with neutral lighting on a white background. This decontextualization encourages the suspension of judgement and positions materials as objective, apolitical and permanent. This traditional approach is contrary to the idea of an archive in motion; materials that perpetually mutate in distinct time and locations. The archive can be more than an institutional depository, but a complex web of spatio-temporal layers connected to real time systems, social media and Web 2.0. 

How are archives integrated within network cultures, web communities and forums? What other digital forms of representation enable archives to activate and sustain cultural memory? 

It may be useful to think of digital modes of representation (e.g., gifs, memes, emojis and insta reels) as traditional artistic mediums (e.g., drawing, painting, sculpture and print-making) for generating new possibilities for how physical museum spaces - which are already informed by internet cultures - can shape memory. We are also interested in exploring performance within our digital online archive. On the one hand it allows us to think about the question of time within the process of archiving and the play between contextualisation and decontextualisation. On the other hand it includes the body and therefore lived experiences, which are stored in the body. We will also further deepen the complex problem of the discriminatory design when dealing with the default settings of technology and data training.

Final initial thoughts

We intend to engage with archival materials and digital networks connected to the Harrison collection, Scarborough Museums and Galleries and colonial collections in our local context. To work with archives is to engage in this process of exploring old thoughts and to bring them to the surface for the purpose of organising them into something useful and to find the return of the repressed. We want to go beyond critique and be part of feedback loops that may enhance systems and embed processes of care, healing and renewal.

This reflective text was inspired by the following references:

• Attia, Kader: RepaiR

• Burrows, Gifty: History of the Harrison Collection

• Derrida, Jacques: Archive Fever

• L`Internationale Decolonising Archives

• Then & Now: Archive Fever - Derrida, Steedman, & the Archival Turn
  

Image caption

Glitch image of four drawings (clockwise from top right); drawing made from an onscreen photo of clenched hands, child’s drawing of an elephant, child’s arm wrapped around a stuffed plush elephant and architectural drawing of Woodend Gallery and Studios highlighting Unit 108 where taxidermy from the James Harrison collection had been left to rot for decades. Dynamics; same/different, conceal/reveal and ephemeral/eternal.