BJP: In first delving into the WIT archive, I suppose you were, naturally, braced for material of a quite brutal nature? But what surprised you?
Carmen Winant: Yes, I think the curator, Ksenia Nouril, and I feared that we might encounter really grisly material. Instead, across this 50-year-old archive, we found so much more: material that was collected from the outside world (newspaper clippings) and generated for public access (35mm re-enactment slides), documentation of their organisational efforts (photographs), teaching and learning material (appropriated pictures made into “puzzles”) and so on. These were tools, so many of them photographic, in service of empowerment. That was what kept us going on this project, to be honest. While it was filled with horror, it was also amazingly life-affirming, full of joy and feminist coalition-building.
Later, NCADV, another domestic violence organisation based in Denver, also shared their archive, which likewise fed the project in so many ways. Both organisations were founded at the height of the second-wave feminist movement, 40 and 50 years ago, respectively, and that movement philosophy – confronting and undoing patriarchal power structures through strategies of care and coalition – lives on.
BJP: Because domestic violence so often (if not always) happens in the “shadows”, how did you navigate the problems and possibilities of visualising it? Could you speak about the large newspaper clipping constellation, for example?
CW: It’s the most confrontational work in the show, and indeed about looking as much as anything. It offers tremendous (if painful) evidence of domestic and gendered violence all in one place. But there’s also something coded about it. [The clippings] are pieces of media. Determinations have been made about what sort of images should attend which stories, and how those stories should be told at all. So they are primary documents yet also exist at a distance from the experiences of survivors.
More and more, I try to have a light touch. My job as an artist, a feminist, a student of this history, is to animate the archive, which already holds such immense power. In this sense, I think of myself less as an “archives artist” or something, and more as an artist who often uses or assembles archives in service of the agendas of feminist histories, organisations, individuals. Of course, I was terrified to make “artwork” of a subject and experience like domestic violence – to aestheticise it. So little artwork contends with this subject, and when and where it does, it is most often (or always) documentary.