The pieces titled "Shadow Monuments (Research)" represent a group of works that were vital for the research, development and production of the video, Shadow Monuments. These photographs and research notes started as a project to document the Claremont Consortium's inaccessible institutional archive, which revealed how archival structure perpetuates certain histories through the printed document, and investigated how access to knowledge is vital for countering dominant historical narratives.

This photograph was taken in the Special Collections back offices at Honnold Mudd Library, which serves the public and the Claremont Consortium’s seven academic institutions.

This photograph was taken in a Special Collections storage room at Honnold Mudd Library, which serves the public and the Claremont Consortium’s seven academic institutions. This piece was part of my research for the video, Shadow Monuments.

This piece shows the research paper that accompanies the video, Shadow Monuments. It was produced from hundreds of pages of research notes and outlines. The paper’s organization is structurally reminiscent of archival classification systems that, though often rooted in Dewey, Cutter, Putnam or the Library of Congress’ own categorizations, are arbitrary in nature. By creating my own archival categories and organizing my works through them I hoped to underscore how classifications signify in a system external to the signified – what determines a category is trivial beyond this definition’s real-world implications – and in so doing question the narrow and oppressive structures inherent to taxonomy. The essay loosely follows these categories: cameral science, the archive and psychogeography, and shadows/archaeology/memory. This construction serves as a guide, or map, for writing that rectifies the archive’s rigidity through nonlinear, discursive fragmentation that mimics my interdisciplinary research style.