THE MUTABLE ARCHIVE

Series of nineteen digital pigment prints on archival paper, 80” x120” and 4K Video (size variable)

The Mutable Archive is a multi-layered series of photographs and performance videos that speak to renewed nationalistic obsessions with Othering and difference. A unique artistic strategy of this project involves the interrogation of the mechanics of storytelling and who speaks for those who are lost, particularly in the absence of verifiable archival material. 

Each photograph from the 19th century collection of Viennese anatomist, Josef Hyrtl portrays a single specimen and post-mortem skull tattoo with an accompanying archive card, which details only partial information about each subject. Collaborators representing a diverse array of disciplinary fields—artists, historians, a medical ethicist, a philosopher, an opera singer, a hip-hop artist, and a spiritual medium—are invited to write and then perform speculative narratives about subjects of their choosing from the collection. Each script and recorded monologue, a 4K cinematic video, reveals a myriad set of issues related to race, ethnicity, gender, and class, while demonstrating the fictitious foundations of the human taxonomy itself.  Rather than follow conventional archival theory, the project prioritizes the relationship between each author/performer and their chosen subject, while exposing how various narrative strategies can speak to the social and political conditions of the past, which are recurring in our time.

The highly affective images and video performances that emerge catalyze an array of voices and stories, which shed light on more than just the theories driving 19th century medical science; they reveal structural inequalities key to today’s debates about colonial violence, gender-based trauma, class disparity, and cultural bias. Paradoxically, while the collection, which includes both quantitative and qualitative data, was assembled primarily for the study of human biology and natural variation, it was also used to explore the pseudoscience of physiognomy, the controversial precursor to the Eugenics movement. 

Research and speculation are united in the exploration of Hyrtl’s collection, which both reveal the physiognomic theories of their time and mirror renewed nationalistic obsessions with Othering that have been exposed in our current pandemic moment. Illuminating the unique cultural milieu, political culture, and technological advancements that influence medical science, this project also exposes the practice of collecting anatomical specimens from around the world in an attempt to make sense of it. With this, The Mutable Archive speaks not only to the subjects enshrined in these collections, but to colonization, migration, and Empire; it interrogates the role that early forms of Eugenics played in systems of oppression that were present then and which remain today.