Archival Assemblages

<aside> ✨ #family-archives #photography #textile-computing #quilted-collage #critical-fabulation

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Project Abstract

Archival Assemblages deals with the aesthetic narration of memory and migration as it is experienced in our places of home; photos that we take with us and that never leave the wood surfaces of our grandmother’s mantle. These photos and their posturing are an essential modality in Black homemaking that live among us as both historical images and as everyday objects.

Through a consideration of family archives, this project explores how ancestral portraits can be digitally fabulated to reveal new ways of engaging with our visual heritage and Black aesthetic logics (ways of knowing). Informed by African American traditions of quilting technologically reimagined through the use of textile computing, these portraits will be digitally collaged with physical material references (ex. carpet, wood, frames, upholstery, etc.) rooted in the preservation of their memory/narrative to sew pieces of the homes they made back into compositions of their humanity.

Archival Assemblages is inspired by the careful arrangements of photographs on altars, in living room spaces, and in bedroom dressers that keep us and works by Tyler Mitchell and bell hooks that consider them. Playing with material computing in this way prompts us to “learn how to look” at familiar faces and objects more intimately to tell stories of interior memory and illustrate the first steps of Saidiya Hartman’s Critical Fabulation. This project offers new perspectives in visual studies, archival research, Black studies, and Black digital humanities by showing that, through digital experimentation, inherited portraits and materials loved by their tactility don’t have to leave us in the digital.


Meet Cienna

<aside> 🧭 twitter @cbenn928

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Cienna Benn’s research explores the modern development of Black aesthetic theory and its disciplinary logics practiced by Black photographers and filmmakers during social movements and initiatives throughout the twentieth century. Her work utilizes the Unbroken Genealogy approach to explore the meaning-making practices of contemporary visual artists and activists along the lines of visuality, gender and sexuality, temporality, and the Black Radical Tradition. As a Mellon Mays and CAMRA Mellon Fellow, Cienna makes use of multimodal methods to fill apertures between the humanities and visual culture through the creation of visual and digital scholarship. She earned her Bachelor’s Degrees in Africana Studies and Sociology from Howard University.

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