Stephanie Syjuco’s book asks a simple question: “How do you respond to the archive?”
Consider the lie contained in a centuries-old photograph. Four Filipino men, dressed in “tribal dress” and holding spears, pose for a portrait in front of a straw hut. They were among the 1,200 people brought to the United States for the racist spectacle of the Philippine Village at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair – designed to entertain and educate American audiences. The dehumanizing display and its photographic documentation helped to incorporate the Philippines’ newly acquired territory into a growing imperial vision.
Manila-born, Oakland-based artist Stephanie Syjuco came across the photographs of Philippine Village in 2019 while researching the collections of the Missouri Historical Society and the St. Louis Public Library. The unruly archive brings together Syjuco’s work with archival collections in the United States from the past five years to examine how the history of the Philippines has been systematically excluded and misinterpreted, and asks a simple question: “What does it mean not to see yourself clearly?”
Through digital and physical interventions, Syjuco disrupts the asymmetrical history of the colonial archive. In her series Block the sun (2019), which is drawn from the World’s Fair archive, the four men reappear, this time obscured by the artist’s hands, which cover most of the staged scene, especially their faces. Syjuco’s intervention simultaneously shows and does not show, drawing our attention away from the archive image and toward what the viewer might do with it. “I don’t make work about Filipino identity,” she writes. “I make work about the white gaze.”
On over 300 pages, which alternate between archive images and text contributions, The unruly archive connects content and form. Pages are cut unevenly, images are often intentionally cropped, oversized, and low-resolution to mimic the unruliness and overabundance of archival research, with the original captions reproduced unabridged alongside. In this sense, the book simulates a search; “a kind of forensics,” as Syjuco writes. It uses the visual aesthetics of its source archives to critique what was and was not included in their historical records, and by whom.
An example of this investigative approach can be found early in the book. A series of three collages entitled Pile-ups (2021) engages the collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. Each work first appears in its entirety and is then deconstructed in the following pages, with different elements—portraits of nameless Filipinos, photographs of weapons and cultural artifacts, botanical images—singled out, resized, and captioned. Syjuco’s “unruly” approach highlights the layered and often visually overwhelming nature of these materials and seeks to undermine the colonial archive’s relationship to precise and controllable data. Their strategic overloading lends a sense of complexity to the flatness of the Smithsonian archive.
For a book that deals so much with the past, The unruly archive takes an equally keen look to the future. Among its most powerful tactics is the space given to other artists working with archives. Syjuco invites them to consider another simple question: “How does one respond to the archive?” Among the responders, Wendy Red Star grapples with her Apsáalooke heritage and the museumification of Native material history; Minne Atairu uses artificial intelligence to invent an alternate history for the looted Benin Bronzes; LJ Roberts exhumes forgotten Stonewall revolutionaries from the New York Public Library’s microfiche archives; and Gelare Khoshgozaran positions responding as “responding to the archive as a site of power.” The unruly archive is left animated by a greater belief in the value of a careful and historical gaze. Syjuco looks at archives as sites of violence and power, while reminding us of the contingency of their construction. In searching for her own cultural identity in these collections, she finds a system not designed to see her fully. In response, the artist recovers these materials from their institutional treasuries—both with an eye to the past and in service to future readers. “Forward through the archive,” Syjuco reminds us, “not back.”
The unruly archive by Stephanie Syjuco. Radius Books, $65/£51 (hardcover)
