JTF (just the facts): Published in 2024 by Radius Books (here). Hardcover (9.25 x 11.25 inches), 320 pages in various trim dimensions, with 131 images. Includes several texts by the author, with additional texts and images by Astria Suparak, Carmen Winant, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Jason Lazarus, LJ Roberts, Minne Atairu, Pio Abad, Savannah Wood, and Wendy Red Star. Design by David Chickey and Nick Larsen. (Cover and spread shots below.)

Comments/Context: The Filipinx artist Stephanie Syjuco has worked in sculpture, photography, installation, and archival curation. Organizing, separating, and occasionally combining these various disciplines can require meticulous thinking. An example comes early in her debut monograph The Unruly Archive. Just a few pages in, two definitions establish the book’s foundation with Euclidean precision:

• unruly [ en-roolè ] adjective: disorderly and disruptive and not amenable to discipline or control
• archive [ ahr-kahyv ] noun: plural, ar-chives, a place where public records or other historical documents are kept 

The Unruly Archive is a fitting description of a project which is bursting at the seams with salvaged records. Syjuco’s tome is a literary firehose of images, texts, guest artists, and creative interjections. Unruly indeed. But the word “unruly” can assume alternate meanings too. In the context of colonialism and imperial subjugation, it might signal aspirations for liberation, the urge to break free from a ruler. 

It’s this secondary definition which is of primary interest to Syjuco. Before moving to the US in 1977—where she now resides as a professor in Oakland—she was born in 1974 in Manila, into a colonized nation with a history of authoritarian rule. She is keenly aware of power dynamics, historical representations, and the insidious biases sometimes encoded in supposedly neutral record keeping. In particular she’s concerned with Filipino/Filipinx Americans, and how they have been depicted in various American archives. Syjuco is careful to note, “I do not make work about Filipino identity; I make work about the white gaze, and those are two totally different things.” 

With the white gaze in mind, she’s been collecting archival images for several years, keeping them in various file folders, and considering how they might be recontextualized and represented in fresh ways. The Unruly Archive collects her findings to date. An earlier iteration of the project was exhibited in New York in 2022 (reviewed here). The current book includes most of that work, plus some subsequent projects.

The book opens with a quick flood of images. The front and rear end pages are both gridded with hundreds of thumbnails, showing bygone photos with small captions. The curious fact that all faces are pixelated beyond recognition hints at Syjuco’s aims. The Unruly Archive is largely motivated by a sense of historical injustice. She may not be able to alter the fate of past Filipinx trapped in emulsion, but Syjuco can empathize, and perhaps remediate. “Their conscription, via captioning and ethnographic photo, into a ‘forever’ colonial subject was thrust upon them and unasked for,” she writes. “By showing how their images were stage-managed and constructed under a narrative of empire, I hope to give them an alternate form of agency over their images and a chance to be seen differently—and perhaps even released.”

Syjuco’s efforts began in 2019 in St. Louis, where she sifted archives from the Missouri Historical Society and the St. Louis Public Library, searching for ethnographic photos from the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Some of these initial images appear in the book, tweaked and reappropriated in various ways. In the series “Block Out The Sun”, for example, Syjuco placed her hand across photographs from that World’s Fair, replicating their dehumanizing poses while physically blocking their visual transmission. If only structural bias could be dismissed so easily, with a wave of the hand. For other photos Syjuco’s intervention was even more blunt. A yellowed photo from the World Fair’s Philippine Village is flipped entirely, showing just its verso with ink splotches and penciled notes. Who knows what image was on other side? Whatever it was, it has been not just subverted but eradicated. 

Although the St. Louis images came early in her research, most are reserved for the last chapter of the book, the final tip of what eventually became a very large iceberg. After St. Louis, she expanded her search to other archives. The various Smithsonian collections in Washington, D.C. served as key sources. The book also includes reconsidered images from the Library of Congress, the National Museum of American History, and various university archives.

Wherever she looked, Syjuco operated as a sort of private eye, on the lookout for buried  documents. In her words, “the book simulates a type of forensics.” The monograph’s investigatory theme carries through its bold design and production, which is loosely structured as a collection of old file folders. Each chapter is demarcated by facsimile images of a folder’s front and back (including manufacturer brand names in some cases), containing “documents” produced on a smaller trim size. These archival images are shown in assorted fashion, some as stacks of prints, some with notes, screens shots, rips, and stains. All are annotated with Syjuco’s impressions and comments. Although no book can truly simulate the tangibility of paper records, this one comes close. 

The file folders fall into five chapters. Taken in order: Pileups simulates a physical mountain of paper materials. Inherent Vice reproduces pages from an old scrapbook of American sisters in the Philippines. Blind Spot blurs archival images with the Photoshop healing brush to signify the phenomenon of cultural oversight. Figure/Ground Studies features taped together constructions to replicate the experience of sifting archives, and the act of discovery via fragments. Visual Research: Image Addendum (which includes the World’s Fair verso photo among others) is a catchall category to collect anything extraneous. 

Syjuco thinks of these reassessments as ways of “talking back” to the archive. Curious about how others might approach the same imperative, she asked colleagues how they might also “talk back”. The Unruly Archive includes contributions from nine working artists. The guest list is a who’s-who of contemporary photo archivists: Astria Suparak, Carmen Winant, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Jason Lazarus, LJ Roberts, Minne Atairu, Pio Abad, Savannah Wood, and Wendy Red Star. Each one gets a short write up by Syjuco—just another small way of rewriting history in her own terms—and then a few pages to share their philosophy and sample images. They’re presented on thin creamy page stock, differentiating them from the file folders. As might be expected, the outside projects are varied and interesting. In a nice closing touch, Syjuco saves the last one for herself, writing her own bio in third person voice. Perhaps her own works will one day be subject to reinvestigation? Might this book turn up in a future archive? We shall see.

Taken collectively, Syjuco’s investigations combine with these guest writers to pack a wallop of reappraisal. “We often think of the archive as a site for preservation where knowledge is disseminated and history is made accessible,” writes Pia Abad. “Yet, more often than not, the archive is a place where knowledge is purposefully lost, history permanently interred.” For anyone tempted to think of history as a static record, The Unruly Archive quashes all such notions. 

For contemporary artists working in this burgeoning field, it’s open season. These various archival projects dovetail with broader cultural shifts of late, a general critique of white patriarchal power structures and a countermovement toward inclusivity and diversity. At this point, the general course seems inexorable, “bending toward justice” to use King’s words, with the fine art world in the forefront. But the long the arc of the moral universe sometimes takes its own sweet time getting there. As I write this, the US is poised for a national election with an uncertain outcome. With the fortuity of a coin flip, the country might take a huge step forward or backward. Will this book be a sign of things to come, or a high water mark left by a receding tide? The answer to that question may prove unruly.

Collector’s POV: Stephanie Syjuco is represented by Ryan Lee Gallery in New York (here), Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco (here), and Silverlens Galleries in Manila/New York (here). Syjuco’s work has little secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.