Ledgers and Legibility: A Conversation on the Significance of Noise within Digital Colonial Archives

Abstract

This conversation takes Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld's installation and performative presentation The Christmas Report & Other Fragments (2017) as a starting point to discuss legibility in relation to the mass digitization of the colonial archives in Denmark. To gain access to the archive, Dirckinck-Holmfeld draws on the figure of the Data Thief, inspired by The Black Audio Film Collective, in an attempt to unearth and excel the vulnerabilities and ethical dilemmas at the heart of today's data desire. The Data Thief, Dirckinck-Holmfeld claims in conversation with Pepita Hesselberth, teaches us to attune to the noise, to the sonorous, affective and textural dimensions of the archive. It compels us to create assemblages of enunciation that cut across semiotic and machinic flows, and invites us to nourish a relationship to time where the past keeps enfolding on itself in the present. This way, she concludes, it demands us to stay in and with the discomfort, and to stay in the cybernetic fold of radical, creative, decolonial and technological reimagination.Pepita Hesselberth: First of all, I would like to thank you for agreeing to do this interview with us. Your art project The Christmas Report & Other Fragments (2017-ongoing), on the digitization of the Danish colonial archives of the West Indies, caught our attention as it raises many interesting questions with regard to the legibility of the (colonial) archive and our colonial past in what is often deemed a post-colonial and, above all, digital era (Figure 15.1). The work was developed as a performative presentation as part of the Uncertain Archives Research Group at the University of Copenhagen and later sequenced into a video installation. Over the last years, you have used your work, both as an artist and a researcher, to explore the affects, materiality and time of digital images in relation to different archival contexts, practices and situations. For starters, could you tell us a little bit more about the project itself, the archives