Archiving my Blanchotian Disaster: Toward a Labyrinthine Methodology in Artistic Research

This exposition invites you to explore my labyrinthine journey of finding out and telling a family secret. The project is developed in a threefold manner: through my subjective readings of my late father’s archive as a daughter, my various symbolic interpretations and material responses to it as an artist, and my scholarly engagement with it in relation to interdisciplinary critical theory as a researcher. My approach is grounded in the work of French literary thinker Maurice Blanchot, drawing inspiration from his theoretical contributions in The Writing of the Disaster (1986) and extending them into the realm of artistic practice. Throughout the exposition, articulating, what I name as my Blanchotian disaster, becomes a major part of my research objective through a labyrinthine methodology of analysing, fragmenting, dispersing, and producing in loops. I introduce these to the reader as they interconnect in my process of utilising continental philosophy and literary theory to inform an expanded photographic art practice.Navigated through the continuous reconfiguration of the physical and conceptual conditions of the archive, this is an interdisciplinary study that seeks to uncover novel relationships of image and thought in relation to the disaster that form the meeting ground between creative practices, the personal and the philosophical.The project asks: How might an expanded photographic art practice utilise the Blanchotian disaster as the critical and navigational framework to uncover novel relationships between art practice and archival research? keywords: Archival Research, Maurice Blanchot, artistic research, continental philosophy, Labyrinth, disaster