AN ARCHIVE TOO CAN BE [USED]

‘We can be at home in an archive,’ writes scholar Sara Ahmed, thereby providing artist and curator Imaad Majeed a theoretical springboard for their multidisciplinary lecture performance.

An archive can be both a terrain for memory as well as for evidence – in this case, for the many thousand people who vanished during the Sri Lankan Civil War. Starting from traditions in conceptual and documentary poetry, Imaad Majeed processes official records, academic texts, newspaper articles, and fictitious texts through the employment of algorithms such as the Markov chain, methods emphasizing randomness, or blackout poetry. The potential for violence inherent in language thus becomes visible, used, as in Sri Lanka, to extinguish the government’s transgressions from public awareness, even to forcibly disappear people.