Spectral Collaborations: Performative Entanglement in the Archives of Nordic Participation in Trans-Atlantic Slavery

As a collective research laboratory, this project concretely investigates methods of performative historiography in scenography and performance practices, moving with archival materials, traces and mythopoetic facts. The research is concerned with modes of confronting Nordic involvement in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and its “hidden” urban archives. Understanding water as the primary link between the geographic sites and as a grave, bodies of water and water spirits play an important role in the research. The collective laboratory questions institutional notions of presence and absence, representation, ideas of permanence and formal aspects of memorial making.  Workshops propose spatial and performative interventions with institutions, archives and memorials, forming poetic relations with the active immaterial or “spectral” material forces in locales in Norway, Sweden and Trinidad and Tobago from February 2019 until October 2020. Archive and memory in this project include territories of shared historical imaginary, where research workshops question forms of storytelling and re-imagining through creative acts.  The project aims to sit with incommensurable sensory experiences informed by sites bound to national and local mythologies. The work demands a slower sensory/critical relation with the haunted present and space for contested narratives. The workshops give rise to immersive durational events informed by deeply play, serious gaming, ritual and performance studies.

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