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The Gift Science Archive (GSA) was an experimental archive of the work of artist Sands Murray-Wassink, commissioned in 2019 by the Amsterdam-based performance art organization If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. The digital database was developed in collaboration with Megan Hoetger, Radna Rumping, through “storytelling and reproductive labour methods” and as a “durational performance” of art archivism. I joined their ranks for a bit over a year and spent many afternoons drinking rose tea and discussing feminist (and) queer sex. I simultaneously archived and listened to the tale behind the piece, cataloguing it as recounted by the artist. Hoetger, Radna Rumping, a través de “métodos narrativos y de trabajo reproductivo” y como una “performance duracional” de archivismo artístico. Me uní a sus filas durante un poco más de un año y pasé muchas tardes bebiendo té de rosas y hablando de sexo feminista (y) queer. Simultáneamente archivaba y escuchaba la historia detrás de la pieza, catalogándola tal como la contaba el artista.
We never did manage to tackle all of Sands’ prolific artwork vaults. Instead, we created reflective pieces that Megan named “elephant paths”, so that the audience could access the work through the themes we discovered and threade together during our performance-work. In addition to this, I wrote poetic responses to specific artpieces. Radna did interviews of all of us collaborating members together with the artist, which were later compiled into a book.
You can find it all (partially hidden) in the archive’s website.
For the 150 Year celebration of the Rijksakademie, of which Sands was a resident, we were collectively interviewed in “Process Event #3: COLLABORATION. How to work together?”, as part of a livestream program. The Rijksakademie also made a publication for the occasion, where we featured our work and where I was able to contribute with an experimental poem named “Archiving Tips Womanifesto”.
I wrote a short reflective essay on the GSA and archival banditry for the “Networks of Care: Politics of Preserving and Discarding” 2022 publication by nGbK, accessible on their website
13.04.20 | Poetic response to “On envy”
A ginger naked in a shell in the middle of the Ocean
sounds like a hair commercial.
Mother of love
bitten apple
dream of
kaleidoscopes
war inside the sea
love stains on the carpet
woman made for women?
a perfume for the
envy
the shore
the
lack of it all
17.05.20 | Poetic response
Was it the fresh “naivety” air wrapped around my orange flesh?
Was it a rabid spinderella story? I can’t tell. you hide always all too well
among the countryside vegetation
pretending you´re one of them
those witches who know how to dwell:
where a cry out is hardly a die out
a compass for cracking
impudent laughter
under evening suns
like an open walnut.
Lavender spells of fortune fall onto your universe:
soap reimagined tastes like love.
Who cares what Friedrich thought? A man against the
world is an archetype for the flowerless.
Archiving Tips Womanifesto:
in response to archiving tips from Adrian Piper and archiving practices with Sands Murray-Wassink.
Rijksakademie 150 Jaar Publicatie, 2020
in response to archiving tips from Adrian Piper and archiving practices with
Sands Murray-Wassink.
Rijksakademie 150 Jaar Publicatie, 2020
42. don´t destroy things ?
43. Meditate, have some feminist sex and come back to the material.
44. How bizarre is it to put rules onto the business of memory.
45. REFLECT ON THE POWER YOU ENACT.
46. BE AN ACTIVIST.
47. Preservation is overrated: understand and tell the story.
48. MUST TALK ABOUT SEX IN BETWEEN.
49. drink some empowering tea & keep hydrated, for fuck´s sake.
50.
51. If necessary, KILL THE ARCHIVIST!!
52. Archive from your ovaries (ovaries are the biggest balls),
from your raw sexual rage and
pay no taxes on it.
53. intergenerational struggles are the anachronic condition of the storyteller.
54. Muses are the only artists.
55. collective archiving practices ARE political warfare: see divergent epistemologies
56. labour performing as sleeping beauty.
57. archiving words in your own native language feels like a spell.
58. genesis death rebirth how can we say we are singular or even delineated?
59. go below, find the water.
60. the archive is a mermaid’s wig: hybrid, singing, and a cautionary tale.
61. Decolonize your methods like a lost girl in Neverneverland.
62. RA TA TA TA HOLD YOUR WEAPONS WEAPONIZE YOUR softest dreams.
63. ritual for archival luck: 2 fish scales (CHANGE for vegan options); a human voice
trapped in a jar; an owl´s wisdom feather (given with care or not at all); 3 and
½ angry mushrooms; one vial of waterfall tears; rope; moon-bathed rosemary
branch (max. 4); Capricorn labour (to perform the spell); glitter-dipped hands;
(kill a man for extra good luck).
64. ´to die dreaming other lives´ is what an archivist should do.
65. bags bags bags bag the whole floor bags
66. Archive materials are survivors.
67. After you are done you get a PhD in archiving (but don’t expect university
money)
68. You relentlessly perform as you dig through.
69. The archive is queering you.
70. Don´t forget that you are looking straight into the past. How do you think your
ten-years-back-self would like to be looked at?
71. Caring is a practice, collectivity is a method, find yourself a coven.
72. Refusing to speak to white cishetero men is allowed.
73. The mess is the trash is the trashy is the value who is the material and what is
the archivist.
74. Labour is the pillar of memory: history is political, your rights are political, your
work…. what will you do with it?
75. Chronology morphs continuously into a rhizomatic thread.
76. Tags must be acid-free. Unless you envision a composting archive.
77. The floor is the first (and potentially last) shelf.
78. The answer is YES BUY MORE BOOKSHELVES.
79. pLAY, have a conversation, take sneak-peaks and dialogue with your materials.
Some lucky days they tend to talk back.
80. Brace yourself: creating a database is like a pregnancy. Get ready to get big,
and I sincerely hope you like crying.
81. “One step at a time” can be roughly translated into “steadily and progressively
succumbing into logistical chaos”. Find practice-based tricks so that you don´t
go irremediably mental. What? Find your own! No, I´m not sharing, I said no!
82. Be your own archivist &
make
absolutely
no apologies for it.
Who cares what Friedrich thought? A man against the
world is an archetype for the flowerless.
Archiving Tips Womanifesto:
in response to archiving tips from Adrian Piper and archiving practices with Sands Murray-Wassink.
Rijksakademie 150 Jaar Publicatie, 2020
[Resilience, Just Who is Venus, Pumpkin.Honey, Archiving Tips Womanifesto]
Gift Science Archive – Resilience
Resilience comes through
her femme rage
his STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE wig
their insider/outsider institutional frame-hopping the lack of remorse for lies well
spent
MISTRAL winds
and a dance for the revolution.
We survived the “last and least bastard Carl Andre”. We survived the DOMESTIC vortex of pandemic life. We survived cishet male artist “recommendations”. We survived a world without performances, and the voluptuous chimeric body of digital archive materials. We survived our twenties. We survived bad sex. We survived zoom meetings. We survived the pictures of ourselves we didn’t like but kept anyways in buried, hoping to cocoon them into butterflies. We survived the am-I-a-whore-internalised-patriarcal-guilt. We
survived Adrian Pipers rejection of our INVITATION. We survived depression and we made a f*cking monument.
Resilience comes in measures unprovoked,
along with
the messiness of long-lived ambitious lives,
and the true meaning of the word “dare”.
