The Sawdust Archive Simulator
Image 2.2.1: Exploring the knowable with Jil Rissi’s and Kirill Agafonov’s “Sawdust Archive Simulator.”
Archival research is often a process of trial and error. You dig your way through stacks of paper and objects until you come across a word, a name, an idea that sticks. Sometimes, these moments strike after the fact, over a drink, deep at night, or when out for a walk. You hurry back to the archive and track your way back to where you believe to have last seen your archival gem. Perhaps you find it, but maybe you come across new fragments that add to a story that is growing, episode by episode, as you make your way across the archive.
The Sawdust Archive Simulator is an art installation by historian Jil Rissi and performance artist Kirill Agafonov, created during the project week “Art as a Means of Historical Inquiry” in 2024. Visitors use their fingers to free up small glimpses of words hidden by sawdust. The sawdust covers those words as soon as the finger wanders to look for the next archival fragment. Stories are thus created depending on the accidental path the visitor pursues. Attempts to revisit the same archival facts by running your finger to the same sawdust again may well uncover formerly unseen words that change the course of your story.
The Tree as an Archive:
Multidisciplinary Collaboration as a Cognitive Process
As a historian, collaborating with an artist has a lot to do with unlearning conventional workflow and keeping oneself from defaulting to familiar answers. Starting out from an object without reading about context or preliminary research was in and of itself a novel method for me. In this project, we set out to identify material, aesthetic and practical similarities between trees and archives.
Historians aren’t by training used to working in teams and to developing ideas in a decentralized manner. The importance of presenting sketches and offering feedback to each other on a daily basis was entirely new to me. Our discussions encouraged me to reflect on my own field of work: what constitutes “history?” What is the role of historians in society? How to approach an historical object––beyond source critique 101? Is anything determined about how historians work their way through archives? Questions that seemed too obvious to ask suddenly gained a deeper meaning.
Images 2.2.2 – 2.2.4: Sawdust Archive Simulator by Jil Rissi and Kiril Agafonov, 2024.
It was challenging not to work with a final result in mind, focusing instead on the process and remaining open to any result. Sometimes, I did not see an immediate purpose in our explorations. Yet in the end, all elements came together in our exhibition. The exhibition was an attempt at making the process of searching an archive allegorically experienceable. The Tree as an Archive in its various material properties tied it all together, with our collaboration itself as a symbiosis around this living being and its historical experience.
Jil Rissi, historian, participant, 2024.