DOMESTIC ARCHIVES: THEORY AND PRAXIS

A conceptual rethinking of how domestic archives are understood and used by integrating theories across history, archival science, philosophy, media, cultural theory, and semiotics as a way to move away from treating the archive as a fixed and final collection of the past and instead, treating the domestic archive as a creative and fluid site for ongoing examination, experimentation and intervention.  

  • A bibliography of relevant texts

    1. Athenaeus. Δειπνοσοφισταί [Deipnosophistaí, Sophists at Dinner]. Translated by Charles Burton Gulick. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927.

    2. Bachofen, Johann Jakob. Myth, Matriarchy, and Modernity: Johann Jakob Bachofen in German Culture, 1860–1945. Edited by Brigitte S. Hilmer and Patricia M. T. Wheatley. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1998.

    3. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

    4. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 2008.

    5. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.

    6. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Domination of Masculine Revisited. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.

    7. Carabott, Philip, Yannis Hamilakis, and Eleni Papargyriou, editors. Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.

    8. Crawford, Ian Peter, and David Turton, editors. Film as Ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992.

    9. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993.

    10. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

    11. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

    12. Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.

    13. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

    14. Dondero, Maria Giulia, Andreas Fickers, Gian Maria Tore, and Matteo Treleani. “Semiotics of the Archive.” Signata: Annales des Sémiotiques / Annals of Semiotics 11 (2020): 187–204.

    15. DuBois, Page. Sappho Is Burning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

    16. DuBois, Page. Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

    17. Engels, Fredric. Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Translated by Ernest Untermann. London: Penguin Books, 1985.

    18. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. With a New Postscript by the Author. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

    19. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. “Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815–1817.” Gender and History 7, no. 3 (1995): 423–446.

    20. Federici, Silvia. Wages Against Housework. Bristol: Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press, 1975.

    21. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

    22. Garnett, Lucy M. J. The Women of Turkey and Their Folk-Lore. London: David Nutt, 1890.

    23. Georgakas, Dan. “Dark Odyssey.” Senses of Cinema, 2000. https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2000/greek-cinema-past-and-present/dark/.

    24. Hansen, Miriam. “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship.” Cinema Journal 25, no. 4 (1986): 6–32.

    25. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

    26. Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002.

    27. Hooks, Bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

    28. Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. London: Routledge, 1992.

    29. Kaplan, E. Ann. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. London: Routledge, 1997.

    30. Kuhn, Annette. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso, 2002.

    31. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

    32. Lee, Jessica J. “Home Life: Cultivating a Domestic Aesthetic.” Contemporary Aesthetics 8 (2010): Article 15. https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/liberalarts_contempaesthetics/vol8/iss1/15.

    33. Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 110–113. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984.

    34. MacCabe, Colin. “From Realism and Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses.” In Contemporary Film Theory, edited by Antony Easthope, 54–66. London: Longman, 1993.

    35. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

    36. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.

    37. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.

    38. Ovid. Metamorphoses. N/A, n.d.

    39. Pindar. Olympian Ode 7. N/A, n.d.

    40. Pinney, Christopher. Photography and Anthropology. London: Reaktion Books, 2011.

    41. Pribram, Deidre, editor. Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television. London: Verso, 1988.

    42. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum, 2004.

    43. Seremetakis, C. Nadia. The Memory of the Senses: Historical Perception, Commensal Exchange and Modernity. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994.

    44. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

    45. Van Dyck, Karen. Scattered Papers of Penelope. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999.

    46. Van Dyck, Karen. The Rehearsal of Misunderstanding. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998.

    47. Van Dyck, Karen. Kassandra and the Censors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

    48. Waegeman, Maryse. Amulet and Alphabet: Magical Amulets in the First Book of Cyranides. Leuven: Peeters, 1987.

    49. Yatromanolakis, Dimitrios. Sappho in the Making. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

PRAXIS


hide and seek (2017)

5 minutes | Archival Documentary | 2017 | Belgium

A filmmaker discovers her grandfather's archives in a closet where she once fell asleep during a game of hide and seek. Produced as part of the EU, DocNomads Erasmus Mundus Program in Belgium.

FILM LEADER (2018)

30 seconds | 16mm Film to Digital | Belgium

A camera passed down from one generation to the next becomes a tool to experiment. The mechanics of seeing and the effort to capture and frame take precedence over any story. And, even if only for a brief moment, we forget about origins. Filmed as part of an artist residency at LABO BxL, a 16mm film lab in Brussels. 

Infraction to Respect des Fonds (2022)

30 seconds  | 16mm to Digital | United States

Images of 16mm film sourced from a patriarchally dominated domestic archive are manipulated and de-contextualized as a playful provocation to respect des fonds - a principle in archival science, dictating how archival materials should be organized and preserved. 

amphiphos (2025)

5 minutes |  16mm to Digital | Greece, United States

An experiment with  in-camera double exposures, exploring the concept of dual illumination, and the aesthetics of harmony between two opposing energies (sunlight and moonlight / masculine and feminine).