Wet Archives.

Exhibition, Project Gallery, Potter Museum of Art.

Wet Archives is a film that explores the representation and lived experience of early assisted reproductive technologies through shifting positions of subjective knowledge. Drawing on dream logic and fluid modes of address, the work brings together a recorded conversation with the artist's mother, archival material, the recollection of a recurring dream, and a series of (mis)recognitions. Composed by a hybrid testimony, the film holds reproductive hospitality and generative refusal in tension.

Shot on 16mm film and incorporating digital screen recordings, Wet Archives renders memory and image as deliberately unstable.

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 open space for experimental donor-conceived, or "AI(d)," subjectivities.

Presented in conjunction with the INTELLIGENCE: Interdisciplinary Forum, held on 9 May at The Potter. Co-convened by Isabella Hone-Saunders and Dr Kyla McFarlane. 

Documentation by Darren Gill and Christian Capurro.