Between Critique and Hope

How can polyrhythm inform new organizing principles for archiving practices? This artistic research will create a physical and digital archive--Between Critique and Hope--that is polyrhythmic in format, process, and contents. In this e ort, it pursues new possibilities for the role of the archive in Black Atlantic cultural expressions. The project has two primary responsibilities : 1) to provide foundational research into how polyrhythm can serve as a meaningful organizing principle for cultural expression of the Black Atlantic. And 2) to gather, organize and engage a multi-disciplinary archive on the theme of black rhythmicality. Throughout these procedures, the project opens the possibilities for research as a spiritual and artistic practice. For this rst responsibility, the project builds on the work of artists who trace polyrhythm in their contemporary practices. It takes as its starting point an understanding of polyrhythm as the simultaneous layering of divergent rhythms. It honors the archive as a receptacle for tradition and heritage, and as an essential tool for creation, while reimagining it as a polyrhythm ic entity that invites productive complexity and rearrangement. For the second responsibility, the project establishes a digital platform that is a uid record of the uncovered materials. This platform will be rhythmically and continuous ly updated to allow for input from select collaborators, be it further materials for inclusion in the archive or structural considerations . Re ection will be ongoing and consistent, rather than reserved until the end. This platform will complement a physical archive built in tandem. This project pushes for a consideration of the archive as a shrine, a portal into another place, time, history or realm in which one can become immersed. Between Critique and Hope reimagines the archive as an experience with spiritual signi cance. As such, in place of linear and monotonous archiving principles, this artistic research will create a living archive one that is de ned by a multiplicity of voices, ever-evolving organizational structure, and polyrhythm . While the history of polyrhythm has been amply studied, no archive of polyrhythm exists that holds scholastic documentation together with primary materials, nor that re ects in its structure the polyrhythm it collects. Principal Investigator: Grace Wales Bonner Project Director: Nick Murphy Lead Researcher: Jessica Hamenyiman