ICR Colloquium Guest Speaker Series

Recent years have seen the flourishing of works by experimental filmmakers that imaginatively engage with absences in the historical record, especially around Black visual history. The archive—institutional, personal, fragmentary, and speculative—forms the basis of moving image works from artists and filmmakers as distinct in their creative practice as Christopher Harris, Ina Archer, Steve McQueen, Cauleen Smith, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Ja’Tovia Gary, among others. This work comprises what Dr. Field thinks of as a speculative archive of Black history, imagined from records ranging from nonextant to widely available and representing a spectrum of claims to historical veracity shaped by forces of antiblackness operating in and around the archive.

This presentation examines formal experimentation with the historical record as an archive of antiblackness and Black resistance through the practice of Crystal Z Campbell, a multimedia contemporary artist. Dr. Field argues for understanding this work as a form of the speculative archive, one that finds generative aesthetic potential in the archival record—and nonrecord—while allowing for the opacities of that record to themselves become the object of scrutiny in their inscrutability. In their practice, Campbell offers a critical reckoning with questions of archival silences and erasures, myths and rumors, and contested forms of historical memory.