The Snake & the Archive, 2022, Stephanie Misa & Multiple Spirits (silkscreen on silver paper)
The Snake & The Archive is a site specific installation includes two silver silk-screen prints, a zine and a single-channel video (color/sound, 16:9, 11”55’).
The Snake & The Archive was shown at the Koda/ RU House on Governor’s Island, NYC on 15.08 -10.09.2022 as part of Misa’s engagement with Residency Unlimited and the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York. It was shown in parallel at Pengerkatu 7 – Työhuone (Helsinki) in 08-24.09.2022.
The prints were later part Roppongi Crossing 2025: What Passes Is Time. We Are Eternal at the Mori Art Museum, and the 2025 Tokyo Art Week Focus exhibition Patchwork of Ruffled Wings at the Waiting Room, Tokyo
THE EXHIBIT
The Snake & The Archive is a collaborative research and installation project by Stephanie Misa and queer feminist, zine-producing duo Multiple Spirits. The installation approaches and encounters the archive—whether as subject, source or concept, and the intersections between them— through embodied and situated knowledge and culturally distinct perspectives. In New York, research for The Snake & The Archive was conducted at the Franklin Furnace Archive, founded in 1976 by artist Martha Wilson, and has supported and archived time-based art forms which are vulnerable due to institutional neglect, cultural bias, their ephemeral nature, or politically unpopular content.
Photos by Oliver Cmyral and Vincent Roumagnac
Following Stuart Hall’s writing, The Snake & The Archive encounters archives as a ‘living’ institution that is by definition incomplete and open to the future and connects fragmented archival histories and memories– dealing with gaps and absences– and exploring their potential to allow for creative becomings. As the snake that molts and sheds its skin, archival material here has been returned to a cycle of creation, reborn, to evoke different subjectivities, knowledge, agencies, and imaginaries and to propose visions of the past, the present, and the future.
Details (4)