About

The Imperial Archive produces, what we know as the ‘truths’ of our colonial past. This information is held in institutions: museums, galleries and archival collections that name and limit sources and systems of knowledge. Archivisation therefore, is a source of power, using Foucault’s   conceptualisation of the knowledge/power paradigm.  Strategies to challenge and destabilize the grip of archives are seen in postcolonial studies, where scholars attempt to open up the archive and look for what is missing, hinted at or obscured. The aim of this practice-based research project is a decolonial activation of the archive, where situated knowledge, will be used to challenge the rigidity of the historiographic record.  This research contributes to this field of study, through the adoption of the term ‘critical proximity’ in order to categorise techniques embraced by moving image artists that adopt situated knowledge (Latour 2005). These strategies are essay film, amateur film, auto-ethnography, a contested term that refers to the methods often used by marginalised people to appropriate and collaborate with existing forms to create new ethnographic texts, and embodied archival practices, a development of affective cinema scholars assertion that cinema occurs both on the screen in the ‘lived body’ - embodying and repurposing what is missing into new archival material (Sobchack 2004, p.60).  I will analyse the use of these strategies in existing moving image work as well as employing them in the treatment of archival material, such as those from the Colonial Film Unit Archive, housed at the British Film Institute National Archives.  In this research, I will produce analytical writing and a body of film work, which firstly assesses the ways the strategies, outlined above, employ critical proximity to activate the archive. Secondly, I intend to establish a new decolonial cinematic language that incorporates opposition to existing ways of knowing.