Radically Reimagining Reading: Heterotopic Spaces and Anarchival Impulses in Kate Siklosi’s and Dani Spinosa’s Visual Poetry

Turning to focus on these heterotopic sites as anarchival, I ultimately argue that their work moves beyond simple archival salvaging and reparation, instead challenging the very structures of power that construct the archive. Morra argues for the moving (in both the emotional and the transformative senses) nature of this type of archival work: "How archival materials circulate and what role they perform in relation to shifting affective economies is pivotal to the understanding and constitution of social categories and to the identities of persons, institutions, communities, and nations" ^Moving Archives 3). In Leavings, for example, Siklosi affectively and literally revivifies archival materials by taking apart and recontextualizing both the 1899 book The Famous Men and Great Events of the Nineteenth Century (by Charles Morris) and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in ways that expose and critique biases and assumptions in those texts and, explicitly, in the masculinist, colonial, and white supremacist societies that informed and have been informed by those and similar texts. Sue McKemmish points out that archiving always functions according to just such a de- and re-contextualization of archived documents: "archiving processes Jix documents [that] are created in the context of social and organizational activity... and preserve them as evidence of that activity by disembedding them from their immediate context of creation, and providing them with ever broadening layers of contextual metadata" (quoted in Caswell).