Honouring Sands’s Horsepower

“Gift Science Archive is a fierce feminist demand to centre the messiness of feelings and thoughts and sharing in our processes of meaning production, knowledge transmission and history-making. Perhaps nowhere are such epistemological practices more felt as in ‘the archive’, a highly contested locus of social, cultural, economic and political power. From Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever to Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, the body of literature on archives and archival practices spans decades, disciplines and stakeholders. Often the colonial violence of the archive, with its staggering gaps and wilful omissions, feels too much to bear, that no amount of unlearning or unknowing will suffice. Facing such a ‘monumental’ structural condition, Sands’s and collaborators’ feminist demand with and through the Gift Science Archive has been to think and practice this relationship differently, through the small, the personal and the everyday.”

“Honouring Sands’s Horsepower” is a curatorial essay that gives an introductory overview to the sprawling, eighteen-month performance of archiving undertaken in the project Gift Science Archive initiated by painter and body artist Sands Murray-Wassink. Written as an introductory text for the experimental database giftsciencearchive.net, the essay moves between critical analysis and personal reflection as it describes the vocabulary developed between collaborators over the course of the project, as well as the political propositions made therein.