you are cold. you are warm
In you are cold, you are warm Toeba roams the Historische Centrum Leeuwarden’s photography archives looking for traces of the industrial infrastructure that facilitated the enslavement of thousands of people around the world from 1621 to 1873. In systems thinking, Stafford Beer brought us the wisdom that the true function of a system is its actual, measurable outcomes
rather than its stated intentions. The Historische Centrum Leeuwarden is a flattening bell curve that produces a Dutch Christian middle class that is free, tolerant, enlightened and wealthy. A duplicable subject that is always already produced by a Dutch culturally-republican government.
The archive is a singular machine, in a larger institution that produces the Dutch christian middle. When we talk about the archive, we talk about the archive as a site of violence, nuance is important here. The archive deals in soft power:violence. Toeba argues that the archive portrays subjects that have been successfully interpolated into Dutch christian middle classness. The violence that gathers and pulverises dissent, those on the margins refusing to be reproduced by the archive as otherwise dealt with hard violence. As is often in their practice, Toeba rotates the archival system on its axis to reveal, not what is missing from the archive (as adding or removing from the archive is redundant in system change), but what the costs of being and not being produced by the archive are. Self actualization is sacrificed on archival interpellation while hard violence is guaranteed on dissent.
