Wet Archives
16mm & digital, 28 minutes 45 seconds, sound, 2023-26
With the temporality of dream logic Wet Archives moves between a doctor surgery in darkness, a green screen studio, a photographic archive and google street view as a woman’s voice recounts histories and memories of AI— of, Artificial Insemination.
Rebirthing AI’s earliest iteration as an acronym for Artificial Insemination, Wet Archives explores pre-legislative assisted reproductive technologies through shifting positions of subjective knowing. Adopting the temporality of dream logic and fluid modes of address, the film brings together a recorded conversation with the artist's mother, the recollection of a recurring dream, and a series of (mis)recognitions. Wet Archives renders memory, history and image unfixed, invoking a hybrid testimony of both reproductive hospitality and radical refusal.
Wet Archives is grounded in a personal politics of "orificing", a method developed through Gibbs' doctoral research project Mouth-making an Orifice, the film seeks to reframe historical representations of assisted reproductive treatment and imagine experimental donor-conceived, or "AI(d)," subjectivities.
MADA Gallery Installation
Wet Archives at MADA Gallery (examination exhibition of the practical component of Allison Gibbs' PhD research, Mouth-making an Orifice.)
Wet Archives at MADA Gallery (examination exhibition of the practical component of Allison Gibbs' PhD research, Mouth-making an Orifice.)
CREDITS
Voice
Janet Gibbs
Allison Gibbs
With
Ursula
Camera / script / edit
Allison Gibbs
Assistant director /Green suit actor
Ruth Höflich
Additional camera
Oscar O’Shea
Music
Maurice Ravel
Jeux d'eau (arr. for harp by Anne-Sophie Bertrand) 1901
Sound mix
Casey Rice
Lab processing
Neglab
Nanolab
Hand processing
Allison Gibbs
Scan
Memorylab
Shot on
Kodak 500T / 200T / 250D / Double X
Fuji 250D (expired) / Fuji Eterna 250 (expired)