Doctoral Degrees (Visual Arts)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Visual Arts) by Subject "Archival materials -- Management"

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    Decentering the archive: visual fabrications of sonic memories
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2021-12) Deane, Nicola Frances; Muller, Stephanus; Froneman, Willemien; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Decentering the Archive: Visual Fabrications of Sonic Memories navigates various strategies of inverting and subverting the ordered, categorised and confined cultural archive, in this case, the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) at the University of Stellenbosch. This practice-based doctoral study treats DOMUS as the site for a creative production of decentered reading and writing from archival fragments, while interrogating the role and power of the archive in manipulating time and collective memories by asking the question: How should fragmented or destabilising experiences be remembered given the delinking option from both modernity and post-modernity? My referral to Decolonial theory at the start of this study prompted me to test new possibilities through the “decolonial options” that Walter Mignolo describes as operating “from the margins and beyond the margins of the modern/colonial order. It posits alternatives in relation to the control of the economy (market value), the control of the state (politics of heritage based on economic wealth), and the control of knowledge” (Mignolo & Vázquez, 2013). Since my heritage lies on the side of the coloniser while I grew up within the context of a colonised nation, my position as a South African citizen is divided and complex, hence my attraction to the margins. As an artist who cuts up and rearranges image, text, and sound, my study of an archive can never be strictly scholarly, as in, disciplined and inhibited. Hence, I determined a decolonial option of working with the archive: to re-invest it with an ability to bleed - to traverse the rigid taxonomies and artificial fictional separations between categories that are generally foundational to the archival process of storing (and building on) records of social, cultural and political practices. Sound in the archive, however, carries traces of pulse in rhythm, breath and voice – traces of blood beating – and brings to awareness the vibrations of one's own tympanic membrane. It is the fabric of sound, the pulse of a particular history through sound that stimulates the composition of memories. “Through the ear, we shall enter the invisibility of things” (Edmond Jabès, 1984). The work which is embedded in herri is divided into four passages, these are Surfaces, Invagination, Noise and The Mask. These passages are further infused by my conceptual framing through the terms “dehiscence” and “pentimento”, borrowed from the fields of medicine and painting, indicating the leap across mediums, disciplines and territories of knowledge, towards a mutidimensional understanding of time and space through and beyond the senses.