Armelle Skatulski
Accidentology (I): Photography, the Accident & the Biopolitics of Extraction
Summary
The documentation of work accidents takes place in a tension between production and destruction, the archivable and the unarchivable, the biopolitical governing of labour and the speculative economics of capitalist extractivism. The work that I am presenting as part of the RCA Research Biennale is the outcome of research, led by practice, into the normalisation of work accidents through the study of photographic documents produced by a former coal mining corporation in the North of France. These are now deposited in the public archives of the Centre des Archives Industrielles et Techniques de Moselle (The Industrial and Technical Archives Centre of Moselle).
The research analyses how photographs of work accidents and of accidents simulations function in the archival-industrial complex of the corporation, as materially and logically correlated with the process of extraction. The relationship of the work accident to its photographic documentation is considered from the perspective of a biopolitical analysis of power and a dispositival interpretation of corporate archival practices.
By resorting to various processes for the transfer of photographic documents from their original archival form to various formats of reproduction - such as screen prints or digital composites - the research probes a tension between the infrastructural, logistical dimension of photographs and the unruliness and transformative power of an affective response to such documents by a viewer or an interpreter.
© Armelle Skatulski, 15 June 2023.
This research was undertaken with the support of the Arts & Humanities Research Council and exhibited as "Accidentology (i)" at the Hockney Gallery, Royal College of London, South Kensington, London, from May 2nd to May 5th 2023.
Additional info
Armelle Skatulski is an artist and researcher undertaking a practice-based PhD at the Royal College of Art funded by an AHRC Techne Scholarship (2017-2023). She was awarded a DYCP fund from Arts Council England to prepare the grounds for a new body of work "Virtual Anatomy" (April 2023-ongoing). Her work considers the relationship between the production of archives and capitalist extractivism, including in the context of the vast repositories of digital data collected by technology companies online or through the Internet of Things (Data Archeogram, Autonomy, January 2021).
In April-June 2023, Armelle took part in Leeds Creative Labs (ESA cohort) at the Cultural Institute of the University of Leeds. During this funded partnership between artists and academics she researched the mechanisms and ethics of data extraction in Virtual Reality interactions. As part of an artist residency at Convention House, East Street Arts (Leeds, UK), funded by the Weston Culture Fund (July-November 2022), Armelle developed "Two repeated measures experiments," a project exploring gestural motion mapping in VR.
Recent exhibitions include: Accidentology (I), Hockney Gallery, RCA, London (May 2023), Intersectional Matter: Waste, Gallery at the Station, Frome (June-July 2023); RHA Annual Exhibition, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (May-July 2022); Unruly Encounters, South Park Galleries, London (March 2022); Research Biennale MRes 21, Royal College of Art, London (Feb. 2021); There’s something lurking in the shadows, Dyson Gallery, RCA & NAFAE, London (March 2019); Flight Mode, Assembly Point, London (July 2018).
