Re-collect, Re-correlate, Re-colonise
Ofri Cnaani works with digital and colonial archives as structures of power. For What Knots Knot Knots she examines what happens when Dutch colonial archives are digitised, returned and reactivated, often under unequal conditions of ownership, access and technological dependency.
One of her starting points is the Surinamese colonial archive. Between 2010 and 2017 the Dutch National Archives digitised around 800 metres of records, some 5.5 million pages, before the originals were returned to Suriname, with digitisation and online access made a Dutch condition for that return.
What does it mean to give archival material back while keeping the digital copies, the metadata and the access systems in the former colonial centre? Cnaani developed the Re-collect, Re-correlate, Re-colonise through archival images, recorded conversations and a workshop at the Surinati community centre, together with participants of Surinamese and Caribbean background.
With them she asks how systemic violence is passed on across generations and held in the body. Such violence is recorded in archives and institutions, but it also lives in habits, pain, breath, posture and the nervous system. Asking where pain is felt becomes a way to reach forms of knowledge that official archives cannot hold, and to sense how these histories still resonate in a shared body under constant strain. Cnaani shows how archives order, exclude and steer as much as they preserve, and
how colonial logic carries on in datasets, interfaces and search systems, from page to database and from image to model.
