Launch of the publication series ‘Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation’, featuring Carine Zaayman (author of the premiering WPC book, Anarchival Practices: The Clanwilliam Arts Project as Re-imagining Custodianship of the Past, WPC / ICI Berlin Press 2022) in conversation with Wesley C. Hogan
In this chapbook, Carine Zaayman instantiates the Anarchive as a means to reimagine how custodianship of the past is practiced. The Anarchive constellates archives and the absences that attend them in a manner that both centralizes the vastness of absence, and leaves it unreconstructed. The chapbook articulates the implications of the Anarchival constellation for scholarship and artistic practices that draw on archival material. Her argument is founded on an engagement with colonial archives that hold strands of Southern African pasts, and demonstrate its implications by examining the Clanwilliam Arts Project. Through an analysis of this case study, she argues that the Anarchive facilitates a privileging of decolonial forms of custodianship of the past that can lead to communal, co-designed and embodied forms of historical narration.