Sites of multiplicity: anarchiving, feminism, and performance

Jean Spencer (1942–1998) was an artist working in the late constructivist period in the UK, making painting and relief works characterised by geometric precision, sequential change, and, later, detailed colour theory. She was also my great aunt: her death when I was five years old meant that I grew up surrounded by her artwork, by snatches of memory, but without Jean herself. This article maps the methodology of ‘anarchiving’ used in my practice research to encounter Jean and her archives, to uncover her artistic practice and feminist politics, and transmit these archival insights forward through performance. Underpinned by feminist new materialist notions of assemblage, temporality, and agential realism, I propose that engaging with archives through movement and speculation allows a multiplicity of locally enacted meanings to emerge, and for individual truths to be found through embodied engagement with archival materials. An anarchiving methodology, then, allows for the construction of new narratives from archival material, for accessing women’s histories in new ways, and for uncovering lost legacies of creative practice. In this sense, performance can be a means to feminist solidarity, where archival insights are fed forward, familiar temporalities are disrupted, and a multiplicity of meanings emerge from its traces.