Dancing in the Archive

On one day in our Michigan Residency, Carrie Sandahl and I worked with students in the stacks of the University of Michigan graduate library, after discussing the nature of archives, what is in them and what isn't, and how we can remember Anarcha and people like her. We walked past books, touched their spines, handled their bodies, felt their heft. We found fragments of old stories, in unknown languages, and wondered about past lives and the lives of books. We danced between the shelves, exhausted ourselves running, ruining the archive with the alchemical energies of water and fire. And heated up after this race, we reached out, touched our skin, then book skins, then concrete walls, and finally reached out towards each other to end in a circle.

----- Petra Kuppers