“I needed to sit with complexity, so I sat with rocks. I didn’t know where I was going by sitting with rocks. My inquiry gained form in the process. Layering of sediments, radioactive fossils, pressure, heat, and time played a role.”
The Unreliable Archives is Kennedy’s research trajectory solidified in a performative installation. The project is a geological installation-performance, an archive of unreliable collective memories, a collection of moments of changing perspective, a shift in how we take up space, in our sense of home. The central questions of the project include: How can we bring together our local, situated knowledge, which we build “on the road” without wanting to make a big “objective” story? How can we learn to speak again from fragments together with others? How do we change perspective? The stories in The Unreliable Archives can be viewed as bricks. Each stone story is an amalgamation of basic materials (minerals, crystals, experiences, memories), transformations, encounters, and places. Stories can be polyphonic, although you hear some voices more than others. In her quest for how we can occupy space in other ways and transform our relationship to our environment and each other, she wanted to allow these stones to create polyphonic sound in the form of audio stories.
The Unreliable Archives are offline material archives full of unreliable (collective) memories. This artistic practice in development currently takes the form of an installation-performance. In the archives you will encounter polyphonic sound stories based on interviews with family members and people from post- Apartheid South Africa in combination with insights from colonial histories, biology and geology. You will find cairns of stones, stories, maps and moss in geological layers in every corner of the space.