13. Anarchive and Arts-Based Research

Humans living in postindustrial societies have slowly realised that the ecological crisis is a crisis of our culture. Therefore, to address the ecocrisis, we need to understand our place as humans in a radically new way. We cannot continue to elevate ourselves above the rest of nature and exploit other lives in pursuing just our own interests. Archiving is one example of the human tendency to conquer and control culture and knowledge. Anarchiving has been thus suggested as a counteract that welcomes transformation and reciprocal knowledge-creation in multiple complex relations between different times and spaces and between people and the more-than-human world. In this chapter, I ask how arts-based research can be understood as a practice of anarchiving that challenges the assumptions of novelty and originality in art and in life. By applying contemporary art’s philosophy of (un)doing the existing unsustainable structures and values, it is possible to imagine more sustainable art-making processes and to adopt sustainable orientations towards life more generally. As example, in this chapter, I describe how I upcycled rediscovered materials in my art (drawings, videos, and sound artworks) instead of starting from mental (genius) ideas and raw (virgin) materials―an approach that allows for complex meanings to emerge in-between the materials and memories.