What if History Lives in Body, Not the Archive? Watch the lecture by artist and researcher belit sağ at Sonic Acts Biennial 2024.

In 1978, in the Dutch towns of Veghel and Almelo, two groups of migrant women from Turkey were involved in simultaneous labour disputes. They asked their employers for collective agreements, regular work hours, higher pay, and holiday time. The labour-intensive work of plucking chicken feathers in Almelo and peeling onions in Veghel has been lost in institutional archives – only traces of these historical moments remain. As sağ illuminates, the institutional archive guides the researcher towards constructing a coherent narrative. Meanwhile, the subjects of those histories voice different realities, expressed through touch, smell, jokes, movement and gossip.

A historical analysis of the climate crisis reveals how power is concentrated on certain classes and resources. Countering such mechanisms entails actively investing in structures of collective care, repair (and reparations), centralising affected communities and their lineages, and collectively imagining nonlinearly and otherwise, also in the way the histories are reimagined through the archives. Here, the embodied surfaces as the basis of thought and action where there is a growing need to ground ourselves within our bodies, our communities, and our environments in order to connect to ourselves and beyond.

CREDITS
Camera: Engage! TV
Design: Knoth & Renner with Anja Kaiser
Production: Sonic Acts
Recorded on 24 February 2024

Realised by Paradiso & Sonic Acts as part of New Perspectives for Action. A project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.