Can an archive be created through fictional narratives? Or is the archive itself a fictional narrative? Perhaps one can conceive of the archive as a problematic temporality that purports to be fact, claiming to have the authority of having once been. It is these challenges to the archive that London-based Trinidadian artist Roshini Kempadoo explores in her digital multimedia pieces. Working with the Trinidadian archive after the abolition of slavery through 1940, Kempadoo invents fictional narratives of an anonymous female plantation worker to insert into the official history of the Caribbean in order to illustrate the unrepresented Other in official documents. For her, the archive is simultaneously a methodological tool as well as imperialist doctrine to be overturned. In her multi-media and interactive sound and visual pieces, Kempadoo pronounces the constructed nature of history’s archives by showing identity as an amalgamation of separate images, memories, and historical documents deleted and repeated through moving images, stills, and audio. This process allows her to extend the present tense into an unknowable, fragmented, and perhaps completely imaginary past.
Roshini Kempadoo. Virtual Exiles: Frontlines/Backyard (3), 2000. Digital Compilation.
It was Foucault who problematised the conception of the archive and the archaeological method, paving the way for many of today’s prominent post-colonial thinkers. This process of dissecting the origins of the archive and the intentions of its makers is the visual project of Roshini Kempadoo as well. As David Bate summarises, “for Foucault, the historian must excavate an archive to reveal not merely what is in it, but the very conditions that have made that archive possible.”[1] In her art, Kempadoo exposes the archive as a limited racist and gendered discourse that has rendered the perspective of the black female absent, and her experience unknowable. The archive therefore ensures that this historical black female will always only ever be an other. Rather than simply exposing this limitation of the archival document, Kempadoo expands and disrupts it through addendums and fictional narratives. These addendums are triggered in interactive pieces such as Ghosting from 2004by the viewer’s physical manipulation of a console, located physically and metaphorically between the body of the viewer and the video screen that projects her photomontages. As Kempdaoo states about her multi-media piece Ghosting from 2004, she is concerned with a historical ‘disrupture’ of the archive because, “relating the historical ‘truths’ of what exactly happened” is impossible since , the archives provided little, if any, documentation from the worker’s perspective to substantiate what it was like to live and work on a plantation during the 100 year period after slavery was abolished in Trinidad (1840-1940). The ‘real’ in the artwork is only evoked through a dramatised and imagined series of events, and where the promise of the ‘real’ escapes the viewer through the technique and form as multimedia.[2]
Roshini Kempadoo. Virtual Exiles: From the Edge (1), 2000. Digital Compilation.
Through viewer interaction, Kempadoo’s multi-media pieces such as Ghosting 2004 and Amendments, she states that she considers the archive as a site for “continuous re-interpretation and analysis.”[3] It is the viewer who evokes the audio narratives, visual images, and their endless combinations and permutations. Through a metaphorical as well as physical process, the viewer dissects and infuses the archive with the other’s perspective, the other’s lost story.
Kempadoo’s artistic endeavours coincide with her scholarly ones, her dissertation, completed in 2008, is titled, ‘Creole in the archive’: imagery, presence, and location of the plantation worker of two plantations, nearby villages and towns in Trinidad (1838 – 1938). She is currently a Reader in Media Practice at the University of East London in London, where she instructs students to challenge the nature of documentary practices. The impetus for much of Kempadoo’s projects began when Kempadoo was researching in Trinidad’s national archives for her dissertation. She notes that in her handling of Trinidad’s newspaper the Guardian from 1935, she was struck by “the literal physical disintegration of the paper in [her] hands” and how this conjured up and symbolised Trinidad’s colonial past in a Derridean state of sous rapture or ‘under erasure’ and in a state of decay.” Kempadoo explains how disturbing it was for her to see this deconstruction at work because of her own research activities, and that she herself “became acutely ware that her research was actively contributing to the disappearance of the material of the historical period.”[4] Through her physical process of research, Kempadoo found a way to visually incorporate notions of erasure, disintegration and instability in her visual practice.
Film still from multi-media work ‘Ghosting’ from 2004. Digital compilation.
Roshini Kempadoo. Virtual Exiles: From the Edge (6), 2000. Digital Compilation.
As one experiences pieces such as Ghosting one is confronted with images and documents from the Trinidad national archives as well as contemporary photographs of life in Trinidad in a presentation that visually fuses the temporally distinct images, confusing the distinct realities of past and present. Roshini Kempadoo explains that her practice emerges from the “self-reflexive exploration of diasporic and radicalised experiences.”[5] She views her artwork as filling an absence in the official historical archives of the Caribbean with a personal narrative of a woman that is a combination of the actual as well as the imagined. Kempadoo describes her art as coming from,
The other’s perspective, the postcolonial subject. That is to say, artworks created by persons whose diasporic histories and memories are framed by a politics of location, racism, and colonialism.[6]
Her creation of an interactive multi-dimensional and multi-media archive is not a straightforward re-negotiation of history, but rather a primary negotiation through the insertion of sexual difference and gender in which the limited perspective of the historical archive is exposed. In Ghosting from 2004, as in much of her other work, she depicts fictional characters through video, still photos, and audio in the creolised space of Trinidad. The piece is projected on a screen, with layers of images and texts, as well as audio of sounds and female voices narrating disjunctive stories. Kempadoo writes that through the combination of holding, moving, viewing and hearing in her works she intends to create an “imaginative and creative dimension…[that] evokes an additional cumulative perspective that extends the scope of the imagination, playfulness and thought as it is experienced in the present moment [in order to] extend ways of engaging with postcolonial narratives, historical legacies, and diasporic perspectives.”[7] In this respect, Kempadoo’s work illustrates that the present moment is fused and infused with the past as well as with the imagination; reality as we experience it is a complex interaction of the collective past, the individual past, and an imagined sense of identity and (un)belonging.
Kempadoo explains her piece Ghosting through two stills in her essay “Interpolating Screen Bytes” and explaining that as one views these images sequentially an audio of an elder Aunt Ruth speaks in Trinidadian creole says;
the windows is the eyes of the soul…
and see the little face of we Elsie pon the inside, scrubbing the soul-eye
of the plantation house,
watching through single, glass frames of time,
watching we pon the other side… Ghosting (2004) text by Marc Matthews
The images depict a stationary window frame beyond which a dirt ground and a projected images of plantation workers in sepia extending into the blackness of the field beyond the window-frame. You cannot see the workers directly; but rather through breaks in the shadows of the imaginary room. One cannot tell if they are receding into the background or emerging from the darkness. The motion between the images show the same window frame, the same composition of dirt floor beyond it, but different antique photographs show different views of labor in early 20th century Trinidad. The motion prevents you from getting a close look at either one, just as you are shuttled off to another photo montage after the sequence of these two images. The viewer is thus over-whelmed with images, real, fictitious, historical, and digital as well as audio. The narrative of the fictional character of Aunt Ruth is only fully discernable to those who speak Trinidadian creole, but the tone and music is available to even the outsider. Aunt Ruth narrates the history of the plantation worker in the moments after the abolition of slavery.
Roshini Kempadoo. Future Belonging (01), 2000. Digital Compilation.
Ashwani Sharma explains that Kempadoo’s ethical project excavates and creates the ‘unrepresented.’ We can then understand Aunt Ruth’s vocal narrative as a deliberate interruption on the archaeology of silence of the female plantation worker that is propelled by the national archive, as well as the official histories of the Caribbean. Sharma concludes that it is in “the gaps, juxtapositions and frissons between different creative and critical discourses we see another truth, another possibility of being and living. The ghostly traces of subaltern poetics produce other modes of figuration and looking, ones that create new hybrid forms of struggle, identification and belonging.”[8] Time becomes a permeable state in her pieces as the viewer simultaneously experiences the historical reality of the plantation worker within the contemporary context of a digital image of contemporary Trinidadian settings and people.
The haunting, and perhaps even slightly frustrating thing about this piece is the viewer’s inability to get close to the images and sounds; as soon as one image is digested it is replaced with another layered and complex montage. Therefore the viewer is forced to reconcile the images in their own memory, piecing together what they can grasp that never forms a complete or stationary narrative. Rather, the experience fosters an understanding of the absence and fissures in the archive. You, as the viewer, are a part of this piece, and a part of the mingled temporality of the historical and digital archive. It is you who triggers the sequence of photomontages through a console. Therefore your experience of the piece will always be different from any one else’s, as you bring your personal history and experiences into the interpretation of the piece. Kempadoo writes that her interactive multimedia piece “evokes an additional or cumulative perspective that expands the scope of imagination, playfulness and thought as it is experienced in the present moment.” She continues that this deliberate gesture offers the potential to “extend ways of engaging with postcolonial narratives, historical legacies, and diasporic perspectives.”[9] The archive in Ghosting is also personal, a singular experience that is hard to share with others unless they too are manipulating the console and thus the sequence of images.
Roshini Kempadoo. Ghosting (2004) Installation shot.
Roshini Kempadoo. Ghosting (2004) Installation shot.
The black female body reoccurs in different iterations alongside images of present and historical Trinidad , the black female body becomes narrated by Aunt Ruth, and therefore an undeniable feminine vantage point on the archive is portrayed. By hearing a black woman’s voice, her voice becomes the authority as well as story-teller, and the viewer experiences the images as Aunt Ruth would, and the images become undeniably informed by her creole narrative. Kempadoo writes that her work is about the interplay between the gendered black body and its relationship to technology.[10] By integrating the quasi-historical narrative of Aunt Ruth in a digital context, the presentation of black women in her pieces also forms a critique about their depiction in contemporary media. In this way, Kempadoo fuses her disrupture of the historical archive into a disrupture of the contemporary digital archive; both fall short of adequately accounting for the lived-experience of the black female.
Kempadoo’s work embodies a post or de-colonial discourse that encompasses the impact of colonialism in the Caribbean in the present moment and as a historical and cultural conditioning for the lived experience of its inhabitants. Kempadoo does not critique the colonialist history of the Trinidad alone, but rather the impact and subsequent reverberations in the present tense within the contemporary Trinidadian discourse, between the dominant narratives and the subaltern that has been neglected by history as it is embodied in the concept of the national archive. Her implication of a gendered archive simultaneously exposes the predominantly masculine coding of history that cannot be reduced to a singular critique of coloniser and colonised. This is confirmed in her choice to depict the moment after slavery, exposing that the post-colonial moment is still dominated by colonialist and imperialist regimes. By inserting the voice of Aunt Ruth and images of Trinidadian women, from both the present and the past, Kempadoo reminds the viewer of her absence from historical narratives. Kempadoo destabilises the discourse around colonisation as well as gender in her work, exposing the national archives as strange, contrived, and at times, completely estranged from the lived reality of the lives that the archive purports to document. As Ella Shohat through Stuart Hall argues, the past could be negotiated differently in this post-colonial moment, and “not as a static fetishized phase to be literally reproduced but as fragmented sets of narrated memories and experiences’ (1992: 109)[11] This is precisely Kempadoo’s aim and result with her multi-media works through her exploration of the historical moment after colonialism and its suspect documentation in national archives.
Still from the film Ghosting. 2004
In another untitled image from her 2004 series Ghosting, there is a literal transportation of the past, embodied in a black and white photography of a woman, presumably from the historical archives of Trinidad, that is placed over a full colour digital image of an empty bedroom. In this image, the viewer is again forced to reckon with the absence of identity with the central yet ephemeral image of a woman in that her face is cut off from the viewer. The eye’s visual reading of the image is interrupted; it goes from the centre black and white image to the periphery of the colour space of the bedroom, unsure of how to reconcile such a deliberate disjuncture. We are unused to the obvious digital manipulation of Kempadoo, especially when digital technology is usually used to do precisely the opposite; to fabricate without the viewer’s realisation, to appear as a real and stable document of reality. Despite this, the two over-lapping images still appear fused into one another.
A transience and lack of human contact is felt both in the empty and unused bedroom as well as in the refusal of the gaze of the woman in the centre. The room is emptied, sterilised, and unused. The jarring modern blue plastic wrapper that protects the mattress betrays the newness of the mattress in a room that is otherwise old; out of date floral patterns on the tied up curtains, and the antique frame of the bed. The piece is halting, one is not quite at home in its evacuated bedroom nor in the cut-off portrait at its centre, and the unity of the composition is purposefully denied. The layering of colour images with black and white ones, and this visual conflict suggests an underlying tension of temporality and authenticity; the viewer is not sure which image to believe, which one is an accurate depiction of life in the Caribbean.
Roshini Kempadoo. Virtual Exiles: From the Edge (14). 2000. Digital Compilation.
The result of this is a deterritorialisation, that is, the once sacred and tangible art object of historical photographs, drawings, and documents are rendered immaterial existing only in digital form, visible only through the mediation of a screen. By becoming immaterial, Kempadoo’s pieces exist in a permeable virtual state in which the boundaries between past and present are blurred to the point of near-erasure. This digital deterritorialisation is Kempadoo’s response to the physical disintegration of the archive; both digital work, as well as ageing archival document are destabilised and intangible. As a result, the viewer is able to experience both present and past simultaneously and the images become a visual fulfilment of the mental process of remembrance and fabrication as the digital images fade in and out in an arbitrary sequence, continually becoming both seen and invisible.
The liminal and intangible reality of the digital object is Kempadoo’s chosen medium to depict the liminal and virtual subaltern subject, the other to the archive. Through juxtaposed and superimposed images from the past and present, she pushes viable representation of both the subaltern subject and its historical underpinnings to the limits. In recent years much has been written about this quality of the digital object, which Kempadoo sees as an apt medium to explore the black female body because the black body continues to be a signifier for goods, tracing back to the black corporeal body as a source of slave labor that is “inextricably linked to technology… and machines.”[12] Anxiety over technology, over the black body, over the history of slavery collide in Kempadoo’s digital pieces.
Another aspect of digital photography is at play here as well; the absolute saturation of digital images that our culture has produced since the advent of digital photography. As Jorge Ribalta, in his essay about the status of photography after digitalisation, notes that with vast and rapid proliferation of digital images, “photography deterritorializes itself and becomes the immaterial paradigm of visual culture.”[13] What Ribalta means here is that digital practices have ensured that our lives are completely inundated with images, through our phones, email, work, television and newspapers our identity is commanded through the ever-present visual digital image. That is, through a deterritorialisation from physicality as well as an un-manipulated account of reality, the photograph is no longer accurate or stable; rather, it is constantly evolving and changing based on our needs for how we define ourselves. This remains deeply problematic for Kempadoo, as she notes that this has enabled the continuation of the black body as a consumable good as well as a signifier for distrust and criminal activity. Kempadoo states that black skin in digital media has come to be represented as a “visual referent; and marks/markings on the black body’s corporeal surface re-enact[s] the practice of scarring, inscription, and degradation.”[14] It is this limited inscription of representations of the black body that remains problematic from the historical archives of the early 19th century up to the present archive.
Roshini Kempadoo. Virtual Exiles: From the Edge (12). 2000. Digital Compilation.
How can one reclaim the black female body within this massive digital world of immediate consumption, to assert its right to be more than signifier as well as more than the ‘other’ to the archive? Kempadoo begins this process through her engagement with the deterritorialised digital object, seeking to “interpolate,” in Kempadoo’s term, or intervene on the mass-media digital archive of the exploited black female body, as well as intervene in the absence of the same in historical and material archives. To re-territorialise the perspective of the other, the black female, one must first destabilise the archive through the figurative process of deterritorialisation. Kellie Jones describes the reclamation of the racial female body in a process of using photography and text as a process of “reterritorialisation” that involves; recapturing one’s (combined and various) history, much of which has been dismissed as an insignificant footnote to the dominant culture. These objects become texts of redemption and emancipation then; not simply adaptations of Western codes, they construct and (re)define their makers’ own relationship with the world.[15]
Kempadoo writes that through mingling history and memory in her piece Ghosting, she wants to (re)create what might have happened but failed to be documented.[16]
As a part of mapping the cultural identity of the empire and its aftermath through a simultaneous process of de and re-territorialisation, Kempadoo distorts the arbitrary separation between personal and public histories. The temporality and space that is produced in her works is best described in Stuart Hall’s term of the family archive as a “third space… that liminal, in-between, transitional space, neither simply historical and collective nor wholly personal and subjective; an undecipherable space ‘in-between’ which brings a radically subjective sensibility to bear on the social and historical aspects of agency and the self.”[17] This is seen in her work in the fictional narrative told through the voice of Aunt Ruth in her piece Ghosting. Through the audio-image of Aunt Ruth, an image of a female within the Caribbean post-slavery plantation is portrayed, an invisible account that has been excluded from the Trinidadian National archives. Kempadoo writes that the archive as documents, objects, and locations of history is “inextricably linked to the way in which authenticity is construed, evidence is accumulated, ‘truths’ are ascribed to objects and commentaries are performed and recognised as testimonies. In other words, historicising is bound to notions of the ‘real’.”[18] Aunt Ruth, while a fictional creation, at times appears as more accurate than the dominant historical narrative of slavery, which is largely written by white men.
Kempadoo embraces the openness of a deterritorialised digital practice to create a visual counter to the dominant history of the Caribbean. In Maria Fernandez’s essay titled “Postcolonial Media Theory,” she bridges the current interest in digitalisation with postcolonial practices in visual art. She cites Edward Said, stating that he believed technology was crucial for the reconstruction of identity in formerly colonised regions, “since colonised peoples learn about themselves through these forms of knowledge.”[19] Re-investigating the archive digitally is at the heart of Kempadoo’s work. The digital space is both her studio as well as her gallery. It provides her with a literal way of keeping in touch with the distant and disparate communities of which she is a part. Kempadoo writes that she interacts through her computer screen, which is also her studio, with her family and friends in the Caribbean from her home in London.[20] Thus the computer screen, as a virtual space, is intricately bound not just to her artistic practices, but also to her diasporic identity. Her images encapsulate a postcolonial state of diasporic identities that are as intricately bound to a forgotten past as they are to the present technological moment.
The present conditions of a racial and gendered identity as well as its historical definitions and absences are displayed through their use of technological innovations that are part of the lived present moment. In her artistic process, Kempadoo is firmly connected to the present tense. In this connection, made possible through technological advances such as Photoshop, she builds a bridge into the fictional and historical past. The past that she constructs in their images is rooted in truth but dependent upon myth to create a fractured yet visually stunning image of the process of remembrance. The past is also a mythic past, one that is handed down orally or kept sterile in historical archives.
Roshini Kempadoo. Virtual Exiles: Going for Gold (2). 2000. Digital Compilation.
The process of layering the present with the past within a single image speak to Bhaba’s proposition that “colonial and postcolonial moments create disjunction, a time-lag that renders the project of modernity contradictory and unresolved.”[21] Stuart Hall writes that the lived experience in colonial and postcolonial countries is one of,
Hybridity, syncretism, and multidimensional temporalities, in which the double inscription of native traditions, imperialist regimes, and the creation of local societies from the moment of the 15th century onwards became a part of the contemporary lived reality of the colonialised subject. That is to say, the present tense is embedded and defined through a collective past that is unconsciously felt by the colonialised subject.
Hall concludes that for such countries, there is “no ‘single’ homogenous empty [Western] time.”[22] A conflation with time, past and present, modern and pre-modern, Caribbean and colonial is visually felt in Kempadoo work through the tenebrous negotiation through historical remnants, modern technology, and a mix of cultures, time, and geographies.
Through digital mediums such as Photoshop and FinalCutPro Kempadoo manipulates layers of opacity to create a ghostly process of layering the past within the present as well as the present within the past. Their images speak to the memory of the past, of its erasure, forgetting, and its subsequent reconstruction in the present moment. In many ways, these images are of the past, ready to fade away at any moment, much like the disintegrating newspapers that both artists reference. They are transient digital images of a place and identity that are in constant transition and thus are completely deterritorialised in both time and space. While Kempadoo’s practice is rooted in post-modern and post-colonial thought, they move beyond these categories to formally and technically fuse meaning and visual process in their images which can only ever portray their contemporary moment of production.
Roshini Kempadoo. 16.11.11 Canberra, Australia. This body here, watched her ‘over familiarity’ and wondered when novelty wore off.” From the State of Play series, 2011. Digital compilation.
The temporality of the archive, the historical material archive of the Caribbean as well as the virtual digital archive of images encountered in the cyber-world, are integrated and explored in Kempadoo’s media pieces. Her work ultimately draws parallels between these two archives and their injustices toward the racial and gendered body. As Foucault demonstrates, the archive “reveals the rules of a practice,” and with the increasingly digitalised archive, the archive itself has become insinuated into the “expanded field of cultural activity whose horizons appear more infinite day by day.”[23] Kempadoo’s interpolations interrupt the steady stream of information supplied by both the historical material archive as well as the digital one through allowing the viewer to interact with its interruption, to control what she or he sees. As the viewer manipulates Kempadoo’s multi-temporal archive, the underlying racial and gendered terms and rules of the archives are exposed and are thus opened to questioning, interrogation, and challenging.
References:
[1] Bate, David. “The Archaeology of Photography: Rereading Michel Foucault and the Archaeology of Knowledge.” AfterImage Vol. 35 No. 3. 2007. 3
[2] Kempadoo, Roshini. “Interpolating Screen Bytes.” Journal of Media Practice. Vol. 11 #1. 2010. 74
[3] Kempadoo, Roshini. “Amendments: Digital Griots as Traces of Resistance.” Small Axe Vol. 28 (March 2009) 181.
[4] Kempadoo, Roshini. “Amendments: Digital Griots as Traces of Resistance.” Small Axe Vol 28. March 2009. 93
[5] Kempadoo, Roshini. “Interpolating Screen Bytes: Critical Commentary in Multimedia Artworks.” 59
[6] Ibid 64
[7] Kempadoo, Roshini. “Amendments: Digital Griots as Traces of Resistance.” Small Axe Vol 28. March 2009. 93
[8] Sharma, Ashwani. “At the Edge of the Frame.” 11
[9] Kempadoo, Roshini. “Interpolating Screen Bytes.” 60-61
[10] Ibid 62
[11] Shohat, Ella. “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial.’” Social Text, No. 31/32 (1992) qtd in Stuart Hall. “When Was ‘The Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit.” The Post-Colonial Question; Common Skies, Divided Horizons. Ed by Iain Chambers & Lidia Curti. Routledge Press: London & New York. 1996. 251
[12] For more on this see Kempadoo’s analysis of Kodwo Eshun’s writing on the black body in “Interpolating Screen Bytes.” 64
[13] Ribalta, Jorge. “Molecular Documents: Photography in the Post-Photographic Era, or How Not to be Trapped into False Dilemmas.” The Meaning of Photography, ed. by Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, 2005) 179
[14] Kempadoo, Roshini. “Interpolating Screen Bytes.” 65
[15] Kellie Jones “’Re-Creation’ Ten.” Critical Decade: Black Photography in the 80s. Vol. 2 No. 3 (Spring 1992) p.105 cited in Ashwani Sharma. “At the edge of the frame.” Roshini Kempadoo Work 1990-2004. An OVA Touring Exhibition. London: 2004. 5
[16] Kempadoo, Roshini. “Interpolating Screen Bytes.” 63
[17] Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy. Different. London & New York: Phaidon Press. 2001. p.67 qtd by Ashwani Sharma. “At the edge of the frame.” 7
[18] Kempadoo, Roshini. “Interpolating Screen Bytes.” 73
[19] Ribalta, Jorge. “Molecular Documents: Photography in the Post-Photographic Era, or How Not to be Trapped into False Dilemmas.” The Meaning of Photography, ed. by Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, 2005) 179
[20] Kempadoo, Roshini. “Imaging Historical Traces: Virtual Exiles Project [2000]. Small Axe 15 March 2004. 235.
[21] Homi Bhaba qtd in Fernandez “Postcolonial Media Theory.” Art Journal. Fall 1999. 65
[22] Hall, Stuart. “When Was ‘The Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit.” 251
[23] Bate, David. 3