[Writing] “Ghosts in the Microfiche” for The Unruly Archive by Stephanie Syjuco (Radius Books)

Writing: “Ghosts in the Microfiche,” a short essay on how I approach working in archives, is included in The Unruly Archive by artist Stephanie Syjuco.

Stephanie Syjuco: The Unruly Archive is the artist’s first monograph, weaving together her research-based practice with a substantial array of visual source material. Bound in a unique format with different types of paper, the pages are cut and layered to simulate the process of physically excavating folders in an archive. In Syjuco’s own words, the book is "a type of forensics...what it is like to piece together a vision of an entire country and people—the Philippines, Filipinos, and by extension, Filipinx Americans—through the lens of the American colonial archive." By examining the blind spots, holes, and fragments of these collections, she examines the ways photography, anthropology, and national archives produce and proliferate images of exclusion and cultural Othering. Using techniques of layering, blocking, digital manipulation, pixelating, blowing up, and taping together, the artist’s work ultimately seeks to “talk back” to the archive and find agency in challenging its images. As she states in the book's introduction, "I do not make work about Filipino identity; I make work about the white gaze, and those are two totally different things."

Artwork and Text by Stephanie Syjuco
Texts by Astria Suparak, Carmen Winant, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Jason Lazarus, LJ Roberts, Minne Atairu, Pio Abad, Savannah Wood, and Wendy Red Star