Ghosting the Postcolonial Archive

Digital Technologies and Diasporic Visualities in Contemporary Black British Art

Abstract

The essay focuses on the critical articulation of a black diaspora in Europe, through the investigation of two works of contemporary British artists: Keith Piper’s digital video Ghosting the Archive (2005) and Sonia Boyce’s exhibition “Scat” (2013). In his installation Piper intervenes materially in the gaps between the rigid limits of conventional and systematised archives: he opens the boxes of Birmingham Central Library and develops a work that reactivates a concatenation of forgotten experiences of migration. In her exhibition “Scat” Boyce shows three pieces that refer to the unconventional improvisation in jazz and develop a critical dispersal of history: what her works have in common is an interest in the voice, in terms of authority and resistance, and in the reconfiguration of the archive as an aspiration for the future, rather than a mere preservation of the past. Challenging the consecrated reverence of institutionalised archival practices, Piper and Boyce elaborate alternatives devotional collections that are not relegated to a distant and unquestionable past. Enhanced by the digital forms of mediation and technology, their art projects open to the multiple movements of cultural identity and constantly remind us of the actual conditions of mutation, emergence and circulation of diasporic formations.