COUNTER ARCHIVING THE AVANT GARDE [2023]
︎︎︎ link to project
︎︎︎ link to info
As the culmination of her participation as a primary researcher in The Kitchen L.A.B. Research Residency, Asha Tamirisa presents a web-based platform, Counter-Archiving the Avant-Garde. The project was driven by the initial question of how archival conventions foreclose recognition of the Global South's influence on American experimental and avant-garde sonic practices. This question led to imagining a prototypical web-based platform that allows for alternative histories to surface through archive entries.
Counter-Archiving the Avant-Garde operates against the idea of an archive being aguarded, static authority on the past and instead imagines an archive as dynamic, relational, critical, and communal. Central to the platform is the notion of the "counter-archive" or the action, to "counter-archive":
“...the ‘counter-archive’ represents an incomplete and unstable repository, an entity to be contested and expanded through clandestine acts, a space of impermanence and play. Taken as an action, the term entails mischief and imagination, challenging the record of official history. Employed as an artistic strategy it pushes our archival impulse into new territories, encouraging critique and material alteration/fabrication...To counter-archive is to counter-act, to rewrite, to animate over.”
— Brett Kashmere, "Cache Rules Everything Around Me", Introduction to Incite Issue #2: Counter Archive
— Brett Kashmere, "Cache Rules Everything Around Me", Introduction to Incite Issue #2: Counter Archive
Counter-Archiving the Avant-Garde allows for text edits, markup, and marginalia to expand the descriptive text of artworks pulled from primary source material in The Kitchen's archive. The web platform is organized around an eight-step instructional score, which invites visitors into counter-archival considerations and actions. In September 2023, Counter-Archiving the Avant-Garde was soft-launched as a prototype with seven artworks presented at The Kitchen in the first decade after its founding in 1971 (1971–79). In the future, more artworks will be added to the database of this platform. In tandem with the launch of Counter-Archiving the Avant-Garde, a roundtable conversation facilitated by Tamirisa with artist-researchers Sharmi Basu, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Amirtha Kidambi, and Rajna Swaminathan aired on Montez Press Radio on September 27 at 7pm EDT as part of the series Instruments of the Black Gooey Universe On Air.
This project is part of The Kitchen L.A.B. Research Residency x Simons Foundation x School for Poetic Computation.
