A travelogue on the fringes of what can be said. Black and white images suggest the departure from the bridge of Manaus into the depth of Amazonia. But the photographs only appear for a very short time leaving behind an afterimage that pulls the viewer further into an intermittent written story, which is alternating with the images.

Anarcheology, the most recent video work by Christoph Keller, is a travelogue on the fringes of what can be said or written—a text which deals with the spoken word and orality, in a film paradoxically silent. Juxtaposing three different rhetorical regimes, the video stages a performative contradiction between method and subject. The images suggest a voyage, departing from a bridge near Manaus and entering into the depths of Amazonia, a land apparently devoid of human traces. Black and white photographs alternate rhythmically with text inserts, leaving behind an afterimage that draws the viewer into an intermittent story.

Ana Teixeira Pinto: Can you elaborate a bit on the concept of Anarcheology?

Christoph Keller: Anarcheology is a semiotic divisor splitting the world into halves, the archeological and the non-archeological. It is a term that evokes something not yet known. But what could the non-archeological be? Michel Foucault introduced the term in his lectures at the College de France “Du gouvernement des vivants” in 1980, saying that it was a wordplay for anarchy or anarchism—an attitude “concerning the non-necessity of all power”. The first part of the film touches on this.

ATP: In the film the only sign of a human presence is the concrete bridge of Manaus that appears in the very first images, almost like a symbol for a “archeological site of the future”, which is then subsequently left behind. Is the bridge meant to signify the connection between archeology and the modern state?

CK: The notion of archeology, generally speaking, is tied with nation-building. The discipline emerges in correlation with the 19th century occidental practice, of legitimizing the power of nation-states by scientifically aligning their history with that of the ancient empires—most often from the south—which were hence publically presented in museums or as displaced monuments. This practice recasts ancient objects as links in an evolutionary chain leading to the present powers, or more generally speaking, charges these objects as symbolic carriers of history. This archeological relation is still at work in many ways in which objects are displayed in exhibitions nowadays.

ATP: The term Anarcheology also deals with another negative definition: the concept of “anti-psychiatry”, do you see anti-psychiatry as an anarcheological endeavor?

CK: One could maybe say that both address a well-established dichotomy, in order to overcome it: the first between psychiatry and the “normal,” the latter between archeology and its other. Also, there is clearly a parallel with the history of psychoanalysis, which is permeated by archeological metaphors.

ATP: Your video has three, so to say, narrative blocs, the first describes a methodological conundrum, the second a personal story and the third a Yanomami myth of origins. These 3 blocs refer to different temporalities. Does their juxtaposition signify the incommensurability between the present-time of lived experience, the non-linear time of mythical tales and the deferred time of written accounts?

CK: These different temporalities are present everywhere all the time: a written text becomes a lived experience in the moment you read it and lend it an inner voice. And when you imagine its narrative, it may become a non-linear mythical tale. On the other hand, oral traditions also have the ability to pass on information over very long timespans, like books do.

ATP: To write a text about orality is in a way a performative contradiction, is this why you felt the need to fictionalize the transition by interjecting a biographical narrative?

CK: I wanted to turn this disparity between text and orality into a film or a filmic essay, where different textual and literary forms are brought into resonance on an equal level. I believe that storytelling can work as a collective device, for sharing lived experience, for demythologising and remythologising knowledge and perhaps even for reconciling trauma. In the middle part, when a personal story is told, the objectiveness of the preceding considerations collapses and the film turns into something closer to a personal letter. Many thoughts and ideas that went into this film are owed to the exchanges I had during a project in the Amazon, initiated by Capacete, with Helmut Batista and Amilcar Packer, and especially with Anne Ballester Soares. Anne is also the editor of a bilingual (Yanomami/Portuguese) transcription of the mythological history of the Yanomami group of the Parahiteri, an English translated excerpt of which composes the last part of the film’s text.

ATP: Your work often explores the limits of scientific discourse. Could one say Anarcheology points to the Yanomami as the frontier of a possible archeology of knowledge?

CK: In my view, the frontiers of a possible archeology of knowledge are the borders of our own archeological ways of thinking. That’s why artists are often more attracted to the fringes of science than to its mainstream. The Yanomami speak for themselves and their frontier is not an abstract concept, but rather a struggle for political and cultural autonomy and for the integrity of their way of life in the Amazonian forest.

ATP: Would you say that every human science constitutes a distinctive discursive practice, a particular modality of representation predicated on narrative?

CK: At least you can attempt to understand human sciences as contemporary mythologies. Jean-Francois Lyotard has coined the word “metanarratives” to which the sciences and also the arts would contribute their partial stories. Paradoxically, in the moment you address these meta-narratives you have already begun to overcome them.

Excerpts included in Anarcheology are from:

1 In Labour of dionysus – A critique of the state form, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, MIT Press, 1994, 292.
2 In Du gouvernement des vivants: Cours au College de France (1979–1980), Michel Foucault, Seuil – Hautes etudes, 2012, 76. Translated from French into English by the author.
3 In «Os Espíritos – Horonami,» in Nohi Patama Parahiteri Pe Re Kuonowei Te A História Mitológica do Grupo Parahiteri, Anne Ballester Soares, Hedra and ECidade, 2010, 133. Translated from Portuguese into English by the author.

Credits

Christoph Keller: ANARCHEOLOGY, 2014
HD-Video, 12:40 min, black and white, silent

Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin