Stories of Rivers and Gold: Counter-archives of a Guyanese Transnational Identity
Presented to OCAD University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Criticism and Curatorial Practice
Winner of the Criticism & Curatorial Practice Program Medal and President's Award
May 2024
Designed by Tetyana Herych
Copy Edited by Michael Bitton
This thesis positions Guyana as the subject of analysis and takes the inquiries, possibilities, and outcomes through the work of three contemporary artists of the Guyanese diaspora: Christie Neptune, Farihah Aliyah Shah, and Sandra Brewster. What constitutes an archive for the post- and de-colonial persons? For those who seek to reconstitute personal identities, navigate fragmentation, and include the land, family, memory, and stories, how are they meant to preserve, organise, and archive them for the future? How do we synthesise the existence of colonial archives, their inevitable status as a means to primarily hold power and collect information but also, all that they may exclude or lack? How can archives be reconstituted, with powers of preservation put in the hands of the oppressed, to uncover forgotten histories and forge new futures? What can that archive look like?
Through selected critical analysis of artworks and conversations with artists, woven with storytelling and explored further through the theoretical lenses of Black and Caribbean and arts-based scholars, this thesis forms a publication that explores the practices of these artists as a new means of capturing what the archive could look like: a counter-archive. Counter-archiving is decolonial praxis: to look beyond the white and Eurocentric colonist powers-that-be and their formulation, stakes, and narratives that have been central in archival practices. Counter-archives are stories, photographs, family archives, and new media, amongst other practices; it is exercising presence of or resistance to the gaps in history by actively exploring or interpreting them; it is both a concrete space for holding material and a metaphysical space for holding memory and absence. It goes beyond mere collection and preservation and instead considers alternative modes of production, cultivation, and holding as means that we use to connect to the past and legitimise presence. The post- and de-colonial archive, through counter-archiving, is one in which the past, present, and future are intertwined to critically inform one another. This thesis and publication are a space for critical fabulation, speculation, poetics, storytelling, and relationality.
Read it on the OCADU Open Research Repository.
