Untitled Actions: Unsettling Archive Space

This paper presents research produced through a self-initiated residency in the University of Melbourne’s Art Collection storage facility. Situated across archive theory, museum studies, feminist and queer phenomenology, and photographic theory, the work traces an embodied engagement with photographic archives that is materially multi-sensorial, unsettling the institutional conditions that govern archival meaning. Drawing on Sekula, Rose, and Foster, I position the archive as anything but passive: a site whose organisation and accumulation exert power over both its contents and the researcher’s body. I argue that the dynamic insertion of my body as researcher/artist/antagonist generates a third space beyond archive and photograph; a space scaffolded by the material and architectural borders of the photographic object itself. This third space is produced through phenomenological feminist misbehaviour, drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Ahmed, and Kristeva to theorise embodiment, orientation, and abjection within patriarchal institutional space. By defying archival protocols, moving barefoot, ungloved, sweating against shelving and collection materials, I enact a creative resistance that de-privileges vision as the primary mode of controlling non-male bodies, proposing instead a sensorial relation to the archive as an active participant in the production of new work.