Breathing In : Air and Atmospheres by Euclides Gonçalves
WiSER and the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) at the University of London UCL warmly invite you to the next seminar of our online seminar series
Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres
Euclides Gonçalves will speak on
Revisiting the Dead Archive Through Air and Atmospheres
Click here for paper
This session revisits an earlier, influential paper co-written with Benedito Machava, entitled ‘The Dead Archive: Governance and Institutional Memory in Independent Mozambique’ and linked here. In it, we develop the idea of a dead archive, translated from the Portuguese expression arquivo morto, to designate and explore a site where files that have lost their procedural validity are stored for a determined number of years before they are destroyed or sent to permanent archives. A common feature of the dead archive, we show, is the way in which permanent files are piled up with old typewriters, furniture, spare parts and other material debris of bureaucratic work and administration. Despite its name, the dead archive, we argue, is a living and permanently active domain. Files are recycled and rescued. Documents gain new life and make it back into the bureaucracy. We closely read histories of Mozambican archives since 1975 as sites of “improvisation and rescue operations”, focusing on how the bureaucratic paperwork of the state has been accumulating in the “basements, attics and verandahs of public buildings”. In this session, I will revisit what we described then as a mushrooming of dead archives via questions of air and atmospheres explored by this Series.
Euclides Gonçalves is a co-founder and researcher of Kaleidoscopio. He is also a research associate at the Institute for Social and Economic Studies in Maputo and a fellow at WiSER. His research focuses on studies on governance, bureaucratic processes and political rituals.
Monday, 6th May 2024
4pm (Johannesburg time)
Register here
The series is convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall (WiSER) and Megan Vaughan (IAS).
Recent work on infrastructures, atmospheres and the biospheric shifts associated with conditions of the Anthropocene have relied on rendering newly vivid those aspects of the social which have long been treated as background. Sensory ecologies - affective or experienced space which compose environments, in Matthew Gandy’s terms, are synesthetic: like sounds, they reverberate within human and more-than-human subjects. Affective atmospheres are shared bodily situations, drawing also on renewed and shifting elemental understandings of air and refracted light. How can we come conceptually closer to the toxicities of both air pollution and rising authoritarianisms, to material and metaphoric atmospheres – and other less-than-visible carriers of damage? And to a better sense of the entanglements and relationalities that such modes of thought can produce? The growing non-transparency of air, in Sumana Roy’s terms, produces paranoid reading: suspicious, anticipatory theories of negative affect. This occurs in the context of the ‘disappearance of air’ in favour of mask filters, air purifiers and the AQI (Air Quality Index) for those who can afford it. Yet there may also be a reparative range to these questions: making air explicative might offer analytic opportunities for sustenance and responsiveness to what is to come.
The Series runs fortnightly on Mondays @ 4-5pm JHB time /3pm London time. It builds on ongoing and emergent academic attention to air and atmospheres and draw out suggestions for future research and for ways of acting upon the contemporary air and atmospheric crisis.