Archive Trouble

Attempting to answer some of the questions set in the previous chapter, this chapter turns to a theatre performance (City State, by the group Kanigunda) and a film (Homeland; dir. Tzoumerkas), both from 2010. Putting particular emphasis on the performance aesthetics of collage in the former, and the idiosyncratic editing style of the latter, the chapter develops a theory of archive trouble. Archive trouble is an embodied reaction to history-telling that aims to disturb its traditional forms, disassemble its accepted versions and rearticulate body and history. It is argued that ‘as archive trouble becomes a central modality of biopolitical realism, archival and allegorical modes of expression start working together, echoing one another, feeding off one another’, but also undermining each other. The Weird Wave’s radical potential rests on the way it problematizes archives of history and belonging, at the same time as it focuses on the limits of the body’s biopolitical condition.