Who Holds? (Annotations on the Notes Involving a Story of Possession)
collected texts and images
PARSE Journal, Issue 15 —Autumn 2022.2
Contextualizing the scripted language for a(n always-in-progress) documentary work, this project offers a consideration of the stakes at play when thinking about the violence(s) of possesion. Looking to online marketplaces that extend the reach of colonial affectations, I am interested in how these overlooked sites not only underscore the concerns of material culture’s physical holding patterns but how they are also always entangled with the digital systems that support their movement and migration as material objects poised for sale. In effect, the violence of possession is conditioned upon the embedded violence of the infrastructures that enable its ongoing decontextualization. Working from a set of reflections written by Emilian Maria Ignacio Silang on the Archive of Constraint, I situate their story alongside these larger concerns to frame the conditions of power, ownership, and property enfolded within archival and collections-based work. Highlighting the consequences of digital culture’s capacity to alter how an object-image may be indexed or accessed, these critical annotations offer an expansion of Silang’s thought and extend the necessary considerations when dealing with material culture online.