Revisited

Revisited is a tripartite anthropological research project, comprising material generated during fieldwork among indigenous peoples in Central Australia (2014), the Brazilian Amazon (2015) and Siberia (2017).

Based on research into archives in Europe and the US, I repatriate a curated selection of seminal archive photographs produced in the period between 1867 and 1912 to the locations where they were originally made. Together with descendants of the indigenous people photographed I conduct in-depth analysis of the images. This serves as a point of departure for our subsequent collaborative photographic re-interpretations of the archival photographs, in which we challenge and recontextualize the meaning of the originals. This method of ’re-enactment’ opens an affective and reflexive space for cultural critique, in which the descendants enter an embodied dialogue with their ancestors across time and in space. The resulting juxtapositions of images call into question hegemonic forms of representation and expose the ambiguous nature of the photographic image.