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NAVIGATING THE POLITICS OF KNOWING





Date
September 2024Editors
Pinelópi Gardika
Cyril Gilman
Kevin Howard Publisher
CRA PressCollective Output MA Research Architecture
2023 - 2024
Centre for Research Architecture
Goldsmiths, University of London








My contribution „navigating the politics of knowing“ to the publication „Dead Ends“ edited and produced by the Centre for Research Architecture cohort 2023/2024, reflects on my research on gold mining in Eritrea and the entanglement of Italian colonialism, the Swiss gold industry and Canadian mining companies and the dead ends I encountered in conducting remote and archival research. The text deals with how these dead ends can become operative productive modes of engagement in researching urgent political conditions.

How many words does one need to read, in order to know?
How many photographs does one need to see in order to believe?
How many metres per pixel is a satellite image good enough?
Between the quality and quantity of information, where do we draw the lines of inquiry?
Ultimately, how much knowledge is enough and what makes it actionable?

DEAD ENDS

To conduct research politically — that is, to search, read, listen, look against the grain of epistemic power — requires that we risk drawing blanks. Each investigation, each body of research produced at the Centre is also a “particular bundle of silences,” as Michel-Rolph Trouillot said of historical narratives, even as it grows arounds the structural limits of its knowledge. Data may be classified, limited in access, destroyed, uncollected, unthought; researchers have finite and variable amounts of resources, access, even energy; sometimes these limitations are absolute.

In Dead Ends, students, teachers, and friends of the Centre for Research architecture confront the lines of inquiry within their research that ran dry, or were cut off—but produce something else through the critical examination of these “ends.” How do we make these ends operative, use them to carve out new investigative routes? In Saidiya Hartman’s words, how do we “reckon with loss” and “respect the limits of what cannot be known” and yet “dramatize the production of nothing — empty rooms, and silence, and lives reduced to waste”?



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