Essay in The Unruly Archive

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“We, the Aliens of the Future”

Essay by Astria Suparak
Collage by Astria Suparak and Caroline Washington
Stephanie Syjuco: The Unruly Archive
Radius Books, April 2024
https://www.radiusbooks.org/all-books/p/stephanie-syjuco-the-unruly-archive

Stephanie Syjuco invited nine artists to contribute short essays about their own work with archives as part of The Unruly Archive: Pio Abad, Minne Atairu, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Jason Lazarus, Wendy Red Star, LJ Roberts, Astria Suparak, Carmen Winant, and Savannah Wood.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

The Unruly Archive is Stephanie Syjuco’s first monograph, weaving together her research-based practice with a substantial array of visual source material. Bound in a unique format with different types of paper, the pages are cut and layered to simulate the process of physically excavating folders in an archive. In Syjuco’s own words, the book is “a type of forensics…what it is like to piece together a vision of an entire country and people—the Philippines, Filipinos, and by extension, Filipinx Americans—through the lens of the American colonial archive.”

By examining the blind spots, holes, and fragments of these collections, she examines the ways photography, anthropology, and national archives produce and proliferate images of exclusion and cultural Othering. Using techniques of layering, blocking, digital manipulation, pixelating, blowing up, and taping together, the artist’s work ultimately seeks to “talk back” to the archive and find agency in challenging its images.

EXCERPT FROM SUPARAK’S ESSAY:

“My main motivation with this work is to elucidate present-day racist stereotypes and their historical antecedents. These noxious fantasies and fears, when visualized and normalized by popular culture, influence not just American society, but are globally exported through the juggernaut that is the Hollywood film industry. Studying the history of anti-Asian legislation and violence—and the dehumanizing and demonizing mass media depictions that lead up to these moments—is grim and infuriating work. In (white-dominated) experimental film circles, mainstream movies and the Academy Awards are disregarded as frivolous and inconsequential, and in the art world, as low-brow and lightweight. But these omnipresent films and TV shows have real-world consequences. They spread the contrived history of an all-white Europe of yore, which fuels white supremacists and anti-immigration ordinances. And they embed the wicked myth that non-white cultures—particularly Indigenous, Brown, and Black people—are too stupid and incompetent to have invented monumental architecture and sophisticated public infrastructure, therefore making acceptable the ludicrous conspiracy theory that many of the world’s greatest wonders were built by extraterrestrial aliens. This is echoed in the successful campaigns against affirmative action and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs, and the skepticism that people of color haven’t truly merited their laurels.

[…]

Much of my current work makes connections across distinct groups for possible solidarities: Pan-Asian (not narrowed to East Asia, as that term is typically construed in the United States), the tropical zone, the Global South, and populations with shared histories of exploitation and colonialism. We will not be separated and isolated in the present or erased from the future. And archives are key to this— investigating, correcting, activating, supplementing, expanding, and reimagining the archive.”

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LAUNCH EVENT

Book Launch and Signing
Catharine Clark Gallery, 248 Utah Street, San Francisco, CA
Saturday, May 4, 2024, 1:30pm

Stephanie Syjuco will be in conversation with artist and contributor Astria Suparak, moderated by Matthew Villar Miranda, Curatorial Associate at BAMPFA.

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PRESS

The Brooklyn Rail

“The Best Art Books of 2024,” Zoe Roden, Dec. 2024–Jan. 2025

San Francisco Chronicle

“Oakland artist Stephanie Syjuco tackles big themes in S.F. show,” Tony Bravo, April 29, 2024

ArtReview

“The Art Forensics of ‘The Unruly Archive’,” Varun Nayar, August 16, 2024

For a book that deals with so much from the past, The Unruly Archive casts an equally sharp eye to the future. Among its most resonant tactics is the space given to other artists working with archives. Syjuco invites them to meditate on another simple question: ‘How do you talk back to the archive?’ […] The Unruly Archive remains animated by a larger faith in the value of looking back, carefully and historically. Syjuco considers archives as places of both violence and power, while reminding us of the contingency of their construction. In searching for her own cultural identity within these collections, she finds a system that wasn’t built to see her fully at all. As a response, the artist reclaims these materials from their institutional coffers – both with attention to the past and in service of future readers. ‘Forwards through the archive,’ Syjuco reminds us, ‘not backwards’.

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PUBLICATION DETAILS

Stephanie Syjuco: The Unruly Archive
Publisher: Radius Books
Publish Date: 2024
Hardcover
9.25 x 11.25 inches
320 pages / 131 images
ISBN: 9798890180766
https://www.radiusbooks.org/all-books/p/stephanie-syjuco-the-unruly-archive

Artwork and Text by Stephanie Syjuco
Texts by Astria Suparak, Carmen Winant, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Jason Lazarus,
LJ Roberts, Minne Atairu, Pio Abad, Savannah Wood, and Wendy Red Star

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