Concepts Have Teeth

Concepts have teeth and its predicate and teeth that bite through time is a direct quotation from Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson’s 2007 text On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship. She is writing about the differential power of one account over another in establishing the terms of being seen or being present. The deep philosophical histories of seeing and knowing [and visualisation] tied to legal fiat, enable disproportionately empowered political forms. Here is idea as a thing with teeth, a thing that’s had enough, wakes up and bites back. The bite itself viciously sensitises time to break into moments of affect, expanding way beyond linear chronology and into fury or trauma.

A concept-with-teeth is an anti-cartesian assemblage, an agential, relational entity. It’s potent and liable to unsettle disciplines and trouble worldviews. One of my questions is how new materialisms [Barad, Bennett, Haraway] intersect with indigenous ways of knowing.

As an artist Minkin has been working with archaeologists for a while. First learning digital visualisation technology in a demolition site and bringing it to creative use in art school, then, working on the portable objects of the UK Neolithic and thinking about how data capture and processing produces new objects with their own anatomy, pathology and ontology. More recently Minkin has begun a project in collaboration with knowledge holders of the Blackfoot people of Alberta, Canada and Montana USA which involves digitally imaging some of their objects in UK collections. These objects, exchanged historically under fraught and unequal conditions, are themselves sites of encounter between cultures, embodiments of contact and relation. They are hybrid, mended and remade entities. Local material and processes are interwoven and embedded with settler material, some by act of substitution, mending, replacement. Minkin is thinking about digitisation as a narrative of 'contact' with implications for larger conceptual changes in art and archaeology.