Paper short abstract:

Interdisciplinary archival, spatial, discursive and visual practice apprehends technologies of dispossession and oppression and suggests new forms of sense-making where spatiality, materiality, the discursive and visual intersect to disrupt and disturb certainty, linearity and authorial knowledges.

Paper long abstract:

An interdisciplinary archival, spatial, discursive and visual practice apprehends the materiality of imperial debris and ruination (Stoler, 2013) encountered in the architectures and technologies of dispossession and oppression across emergency landscapes and geographies of resistance of both post-colonial Kenya and the settler colonial regime over historic Palestine. Creative research-orientated interdisciplinary practice asks what the architectures and technologies so encountered perform for the power of the state; how carcerality composes and re-composes geographies; and the ways that such contrapuntal readings, made possible where and when spatiality, materiality, the discursive, the archival and the visual intersect, act together to disrupt and disturb certainty, linearity and authorial knowledges.

The paper brings forward encounters with the remnants, material assemblages and spatial arrangements of sites of incarceration, interrogation and execution, of arbitrary arrest and collective punishment, of enclosure and erasure, and of bodies and bones scattered across carceral geographies. Photographic rendering of encounters sit in conversation with archival photographic records and literary cultural production. The paper considers what it frames as the event of the encounter, the performance of visual apprehension through exhibition and exposition, the visual and spatial encounter with the claims of the colonial archival record, and the ways in which intertwined and overlapping narratives render the contradictory past in the polyvocal present.

Drawing on situated knowledges, the paper suggests that both an autobiographical turn and a feminist mode of interdisciplinary inquiry places art alongside scholarship to render both new forms of sense-making and of practice itself.