Invasive Archives considers the archive as a living ecology in which knowledge, language, and power circulate alongside seeds, roots, and spores.
Taking V. Y. Mudimbe's notion of the "Colonial Library" as a point of departure, the exhibition examines how systems of classification continue to shape our understanding of landscapes, histories, and the natural world.
Invasive Archives works with altered Kennis encyclopedias, maps, paper pulp, bookbinding materials, plant fibers, gum arabic, and porcelain. The books are dismantled, transformed, and reconfigured, while fragments of plant matter, geological forms, and cartographic structures enter the space of the archive.
Through these material interventions, the authority of the printed page is made porous, unstable, and capable of proliferation. The altered encyclopedias are not simply a critique of classification, but perform a different kind of classification, one in which invasive plants, colonial histories, books, objects, humans, and non-human agents enter the same unstable archive. This draws on an interest in fictional encyclopedism, using the encyclopaedia as a form that appears to organise and authenticate knowledge, while simultaneously revealing its constructed nature.
Through alteration, displacement, and recombination, the familiar authority of the encyclopaedic page becomes speculative, a system in which fact, fiction, memory, taxonomy, and material encounter overlap. The plants that appear throughout the work among them prickly pear, moth vine, and cassava are not merely botanical subjects. They carry histories of movement, cultivation, trade, and displacement. Their ability to travel, take root, and transform their surroundings provides a parallel for the movement of knowledge itself. Knowledge here is never entirely contained. It is transported, translated, appropriated, and reconfigured across places and systems. In this sense, the archive behaves like an invasive species: it travels, takes root, alters its surroundings, and produces new relationships.
Invasive Archives proposes an archive that is not closed or stable, but one that continually mutates through contact; an ecology of fragments in which histories, materials, species, and forms of knowledge coexist, overlap, and give rise to new relationships.
