ASU Scholarship Showcase

As speculative aesthetics, what might feminist ontologies and artist imaginings do for rethinking the "real" assemblages and infrastructures of our quotidian experience, particularly with respect to those that standardize aggressive capital agendas, maximum industrial output and extreme waste? This paper draws connections between female artists' image and event-making, speculative design and tacit knowledge, as sensing tools for technological possibilities at a time when energy dependency, in the form of electricity, is the greatest generator of fossil fuel waste and pollution. I use Remedios Varo's paintings from the mid 1930-1960s as a springboard to think about sustainability and ecological design from an embodied, fem-magic and deep-time perspective, and I draw from other female artists whose work explores technologies and energy, such as Alice Aycock, Tania Candiani, Cassie Meador and Hito Steyerl. An analysis of these artists' works allows me to explore the ways that feminist imaginings function as an ontological orientation that shifts power away from contemporary infrastructures, to decolonize and re-feminize electrical possibilities as alternative ways of engaging with and sensing assemblages.

Mexicans and Mexican Americans have resided in Arizona since the early 16th century. Their history, however, is severely under-documented in the state’s archival repositories. As of 2012, this community is represented in a mere 1-2% of the state’s known archival holdings, and 98% of such documentation is held at Arizona State University’s Chicano/a Research Collection (CRC). This article provides a historical review of the CRC’s establishment in 1970 and how its founding Curator, Dr. Christine Marín, transformed a small circulating book collection into Arizona’s largest repository for Mexican American history. It goes on to examine how the CRC’s sitting Archivist is using social media in tandem with a community-based workshop, bilingual promotional materials and finding aids, and description of unprocessed collections as community outreach and collection development tools in order to remedy the under-documentation of Mexican American history in Arizona. We argue that augmenting traditional archival field collecting methods with these strategies enables the CRC to build a more robust relationship with Arizona’s Mexican American community, allows us to continue expanding our archival holdings, and serves as an example for other repositories seeking to enhance their documentation of marginalized communities.