“ANTIDISICIPLINARY“
- Manifesting something new: worldbuilding and imagining beyond what already exists
- Practicing refusal: working against the rigidity of disciplines and the tyranny of experts
Our first public history talk of 2025 was a deeply expansive conversation featuring the antidisciplinary artist and creative researcher Ethel-Ruth Tawe. Whilst this reflection of the conversation leans into three distinctive parts and prompts that framed the discussion – moving in flow, deep listening, and practicing refusal – as a whole the discussion was based on the theme, Listening to the Liminal: Anti-disciplinary approaches to archival practice. It touched on pertinent topics and questions within archiving as explored through the different projects and works that Ethel has created.
MOVING IN FLOW
How can flow and experimentation, infuse the practice of archiving with creativity and newness?
Ethel’s practice as a whole is rooted in experimentation and embracing shape-shifting flow. Whilst acknowledging that discipline – especially framed within the context of ritual – is beautiful and necessary, Ethel raised a pertinent question regarding how an allegiance to a rigid form of discipline might limit and cage the ways in which we understand ourselves and our work. This question prompted the move towards stepping into an articulation of antidisciplinary as the act of manifesting something, the act of building new worlds and inviting new perspectives. In many ways, the embracing of antidisciplinary praxis allows for multiple realities and truths to exist in the archive, makes room for the necessary disruption of archaic colonial understandings of history, and allows the work birthed from the archive to flow towards taking on different forms. Within Ethel’s practice, we see this multiplicity and flow in engaging with the archive not only through her curation of listening2images, but in her artworks such as “Typing…” (2023), and “Opacity” (2023).
DEEP LISTENING
How can we incorporate counter-intuitive ways of giving attention to what archives are showing us about the spaces we occupy and the worlds we live in?
Within the framework of Ethel’s digital curative practice listening2images, we encounter a counter-intuitive way of engaging with images, art and archives. Her work prompts questions about the importance of not just giving attention to artistic and cultural work solely through sight but with one’s entire being. We are thus drawn to the methodology of archival practice being an act of attending to what is often overlooked or bypassed within the archive. With listening2images functioning as a citational practice, honoring a lineage of knowledge-keepers and makers, Ethel’s work leads us to think more critically and expansively about the political and social nature of the archive. This act of deep listening asks us to honour feeling and how our encounters with the archive resonate holistically within the body, mind, and soul.
PRACTICING REFUSAL
How might we practice the refusal of diminished subjecthood whilst navigating the complexities of archives?
Given the predominance of the “tyranny of experts,” the act of refusal is a necessary counter to those that seek to uphold a Western-based, singular, dominant narrative surrounding archives and histories. It is imperative to keep in mind that these hegemonic narratives within archival, cultural, and artistic work often do not fully and accurately capture African contexts and realities, and so refusal is vital. This practice of refusal was framed so succinctly by a citation Ethel shared that was created by the Practice Refusal Collective in which the Collective states that this act of refuting is a “rejection of this current status quo as liveable… a refusal to accept black precarity as inevitable, and a refusal to embrace the terms of diminished subjecthood through which black subjects are presented.”
CONCLUSION
Within these three interconnected webs of archival practice – moving in flow, deep listening, and practicing refusal – the conversation also touched on what consent and ownership look like within archiving, the language used to talk about and frame this work, as well as navigating accessibility or the lack thereof whilst researching. To tune into this deeply insightful conversation click here [hyperlink video] and to keep up with Ethel’s work click here, here, and here.
“The very idea of a ‘living archive’ contradicts this fantasy of completeness. […] It cannot be complete because our present practice immediately adds to it, and our new interpretations inflect it differently.” – Stuart Hall
Watch the Full Conversation here:
Find the full conversation here, complete with some brilliant questions that were asked by members of our community.
