Archive Find of the Week #2

by Kiani 1 Comment

Find: Handwritten edits for books; including handwritten text and taped quotes and phrases

Last week,  I happened upon folders and folders of handwritten edits and iterations of texts made by Ntozake Shange. I was struck by the sheer amount of paper utilized to refashion every edition of a text that she was working on. As I poured through the edits to make connections between the edits, I became fascinated by the aesthetic qualities of the documents I was beholding. Some pages of the edits were just lines and lines of elegant script and some pages began to take on the form of collages in that Shange had taped and fastened other bits of text onto the pages of her edits.

It was looking through these pages that I decided that I wanted to use the archival materials as the aesthetic base of my final project. The pages and pages of elegant script were evocative– some were water stained such that the text ran almost like water color. Others felt very full with there collaged quotes and phrases. Further, it was exciting to perceive something new about the pages every time I looked at them– from the color and texture of the paper to the actual words being evoked upon the page.

Comment ( 1 )

  1. Tiana Reid
    Amazing description, Kiani. It's so generative to see how you've been honoring the processual elements that archives tend to dramatize (especially Shange's, it seems). How would you write a caption for material like this? Or would you at all? (Perhaps that first line you wrote is one.) I could see a way to reproduce many, many, many of these documents without necessarily stopping on each to editorialize. I look forward to seeing how you present and keep some of the aesthetic feel that these different iterations have.

Leave a reply