Archive to Mine: Inheritance, Hauntology, and Practice

Abstract

Archive to Mine: Inheritance, Hauntology and Practice is a practice-based research project examining the interplay of nonhuman materialities and familial legacies within anthropocentric ecological crisis. Through a photomedia-based inquiry into my great-grandfather Francis ‘Frank’ Reginald Martin’s archive, I trace his reported mining sites across western New South Wales. Frank's archive acknowledges my personal entanglement in the harms of Western epistemic regimes, and I seek repair and reconciliation with Indigenous communities and country through my practice.

I employ ecological thinking and situated knowledge as counter-epistemologies. I examine how the archive’s fallibility exposes the influence of social habitus on representation and use hauntology as a generative lens for engaging with Frank’s presence and absence. Fieldwork across his locations positions land as an interlocutor for his ghost.

The arc of my practice attempts an impossible story: contraposing memory and forgetting, fact and myth, subject and object, and the virtual and the real. In mapping Frank’s spatial and temporal terrain, I produce open-ended, speculative works which reflect a polytemporal phenomenology and the dynamic agency of the more-than-human world.