by Mirra-Margarita Ianeva

Historical maps, scientific texts, aerial geological photography, and other archival documents may seem like objective records of the past, but they often reflect the perspectives and ideologies of those in power. Rather than simply preserving history, they help shape it, reinforcing systems of dominance and distorting or obscuring other stories.

In Weather and the Whale, several artists explore how archives—their structures, logics, and narratives—are intertwined with colonial histories. They examine the problems that arise when such materials are treated as authoritative sources of knowledge, uncover the silenced voices of the colonized, and propose alternative methods for remembering and preserving the past.

This study guide invites you to examine the colonial foundations of archival material and consider how artists and we as viewers might rethink what it means to preserve the past. 

REFLECT
Think of a personal or institutional archive you’ve encountered. What stories does it tell, and whose voices are highlighted?

Beyond the Archive as Source

In her essay “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance” (2002), historian and anthropologist Ann Stoler explores the seductive authority of the archive, challenging the tendency to treat it as a neutral repository of facts—a place to extract information and confirm hypotheses, what she calls the “archive as source.” Stoler argues that the archive is never just a passive container of knowledge. Its form, classification systems, and epistemological frameworks are historically situated and deeply embedded in the exercise of colonial power. As such, archives must be approached as “subjects” in and of themselves—entities to be analyzed and deciphered. 

Interdisciplinary artist Christine Howard Sandoval, who is of Chalon Ohlone, Mexican, and Spanish ancestry, adopts this critical stance in her works featured in the Weather and the Whale exhibition. Through a material and linguistic interrogation of colonial archives, she deconstructs their structure and authority.

Her sculptural installation Fourth Person Singular (2025), pictured above, evokes the bureaucratic and extractive logics of the archive. The work is composed of metal frameworks and gridded surfaces reminiscent of aerial surveillance maps and archival flat files, over which mounds of adobe have been shaped and dragged. The rich composition of the adobe—an amalgam of California coastal soil, clay, and sand collected and mixed by the artist—disrupts the clean order of the grid, symbolically challenging the fixity of the colonial archive and its knowledge claims. Simultaneously, the sculpture manifests another kind of archive, one that acknowledges the earth itself as a living source of knowledge.

Archival materials invoke categorization in order to claim a knowledge; my work is to disrupt the sense of clarity and reveal the holes within the archive.

CHRISTINE HOWARD SANDOVAL, Weather and the Whale catalogue

In a nearby vitrine, materials drawn from Howard Sandoval’s own archival research are displayed. These documents reveal the tension she navigates in using colonial records of her community as a tool for revitalizing the Chalon language. As many Native Californians like herself, she must often turn to colonial archives as one of the few written records of her language and traditions, a fraught act that demands careful reading between the lines, and an awareness of what those lines leave out. Howard Sandoval describes this practice as a form of doublethink, referencing the psychological dissonance produced when colonial subjects are forced to engage with oppressive narratives in order to reclaim their own histories.

One item in the vitrine is a series of 19 photographs she took while doing research in the Robert Louis Oswalt Papers at UC Berkeley, which document Oswalt’s fieldwork on Pomoan and other California Native languages. Within one box, Howard Sandoval found a set of uncategorized envelopes containing dried medicinal plants. The unexpected presence of these plants within an academic archive focused on language resonated with her ongoing inquiry into how plants act as living archives, carrying the memory of particular places.

Resurfacing Submerged Perspectives

In her essay “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), Black studies scholar Saidiya Hartman argues that colonial archives rarely tell the stories of the colonized in their own voices. Instead, these are filtered through the perspectives of those in power—what Hartman terms “failed witness[es]” because they simultaneously archive and silence. They fail to remember the names of the colonized, record the things they said, or even note their silence. The question she asks is profound: how do we recover voices and perspectives that history has obscured or erased?

How does one listen for the groans and cries, the undecipherable songs, the crackle of fire in the cane fields, the laments for the dead, and the shouts of victory, and then assign words to all of it? Is it possible to construct a story from “the locus of impossible speech” or resurrect lives from the ruins? Can beauty provide an antidote to dishonor, and love a way to “exhume buried cries” and reanimate the dead?

Saidiya Hartman

RESPOND
Choose one of Hartman’s questions above and free-write in response for 10 minutes.

Stories of Resistance in California’s Mission System

Hartman’s questions resonate with Mexican/Italian-American and Chumash artist John Jota Leaños work’s Decolonial Cartographies: “California” (2025), a two-channel video installation that honors Indigenous ways of knowing while interrogating what official histories of California leave out—and what might emerge if we retold that history from the perspective of Native resistance. 

One screen of Decolonial Cartographies: “California” resurfaces stories of resistance within the California mission system—a network of 21 religious outposts stretching from Sonoma to San Diego established by Franciscan missionaries between 1769 and 1823. While textbooks often frame the missions as peaceful sites of salvation, they were in reality instruments of captivity, designed to dismantle Indigenous life through forced labor, religious imposition, and cultural erasure. The work re-maps this carceral infrastructure while foregrounding the histories of revolt it provoked. Using animation and documentary techniques, Leaños visualizes uprisings led by the Chumash, Kumeyaay, and Suisun peoples at missions in Santa Inés, La Purísima, and San Diego in the early 1800s.

The missions were built to sever: to pull people from each other, from land, from language. The carceral logic of the missions was deliberate—walls, conversions, surveillance, violations, silence. But it didn’t work. Or rather, it worked in all the wrong ways. The missions failed to pacify, failed to disappear, failed in their attempt at widespread memory loss. Instead, flames burned with rage, honed into precise aim; fire was kin and collaborator, restoring balance—another return.

JOHN JOTA LEAÑOS, Weather and the Whale catalogue

Mapping Whale Stories

Like Leaños, Colombian multidisciplinary artist Carolina Caycedo borrows from the conventions of cartography to complicate its legacies in colonial efforts to map and make legible—all the while flattening—the vastness of lands and ocean. 

In Our Blue Corridors (2025), Caycedo offers a large-scale painted map that centers whales and their watery worlds, which, like lands and peoples, have been colonized throughout history. The painting visualizes the intimate and often invisible dynamics of marine life—nursing, playing, breeding—through the submerged gaze of the whale. These vignettes of underwater life, as she calls them, form a “cartography of stories” that references the cartographic work of Mexican painter and caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957).

In the clip below, Caycedo homes in on several of these vignettes and explains how she uses the aesthetics of traditional cartography while also decentering the human perspective and emphasizing interconnection.

DISCUSS
How does Carolina Caycedo’s “cartography of stories” compare and contrast to the kinds of maps you are familiar with?

Plants and Bodies as Living Archives

In her essay “The Seed Keepers” (2024), art historian Pooja Sen considers what a decolonial approach to archiving might look like. She asks: “How can [archiving] resist museumification and [maintain] the vitality of being in the world? How do artists resist replicating the colonial archive’s logics?” As Sen’s questions suggest, the preservation of culture in archives and heritage sites, even when enacted towards liberatory ends, often risks reproducing the logics of the colonial archive—its tendency to individuate, isolate, classify, and fix.

Several artists in Weather and the Whale propose alternative ways of preserving and remembering languages, cultures, and places outside the bounds of the formal archive. Together, they foreground plants and bodies as living archives—growing, mobile, and adaptable to changing environmental conditions.

The Fugitivity of Dyes

Just as adobe functions like a living, breathing material in Fourth Person Singular discussed above, in Christine Howard Sandoval’s The First Color Is Red (2025) natural dyes gesture to plants as living archives for retrieving and relearning ancestral language. In this large-scale installation spanning an entire wall, sixty-three hand-dyed sheets of paper are blind-embossed with barely visible phrases, such as “In the swampy areas they create a commons” or “Flowers applied as hot as one can handle to quickly close deep wounds.” These phrases tell stories of Indigenous medicinal knowledge, language, and matriarchal resistance.

The dyes come from the cochineal beetle, an insect that produces a bright pink hue, as well as medicinal plants Howard Sandoval encountered at the Amah Mutsun Relearning Garden at the UC Santa Cruz’s arboretum—itself a living archive. Rather than isolating and categorizing the plants according to the colonial logics of botanical classification, the artist boiled them into dyes, sometimes blending them together, and applied them to paper, fixing them in ways that remain unstable. Over time, the colors will fade, darken, and shift—a process she understands as a form of fugitivity.

I’m really interested in my work, across different mediums, in a living materiality. There isn’t any stasis in my work; it’s always shifting.

CHRISTINE HOWARD SANDOVAL

In the clip below, Howard Sandoval discusses her work in the exhibition and how she approaches archival research.

REFLECT
Consider the process of turning plants into dyes and fixing them onto paper. What kind of material transformation does this involve? How might we think of the plant as living on in the dyed paper?

The Embodied Memory of Places We Walk Through

In another work featured in Weather and the Whale, titled Signos Cardinales (2009), Colombian artist and doctor Libia Posada turns to memory held in the body.

Created with displaced women in Medellín, Colombia, the installation reconstructs the paths these women walked from their homes, rendered as hand-drawn maps on their legs. Posada made the maps based on the stories the women shared with her about the routes they traveled—routes which, she noticed, rarely aligned with the official maps of the nation, with their focus on borders, trade routes, and property. Instead, the women’s stories revealed an alternate cartography, one mapped through sensorial experience and trauma rather than sanctioned borders or official place names. Alongside the twelve black and white photographs of the women’s legs, a printed key redefines orientation: east and west become right and left (the rhythmic measure of the walking pace), paths are traced by modes of transportation, and distances marked in strides. These embodied maps center lived experience over state-sanctioned geography.

To learn more about Libia Posada’s work, read “Cartographies of Diasporic Thinking” by Catalina Hidalgo Nieto and Nicolas Lema Habash

The Power of Bodies That Come Together

Similarly, in Paso Seguro / Safe Passage (2025), a performance in which human bodies imprinted a living image onto the land, what the artist calls a “geochoreography,” Carolina Caycedo highlights the vulnerabilities shared between people and other species—like whales—who cross borders drawn by humans but not recognized by nature. The performance took place in March 2025 on the main campus of UC Santa Cruz, in a field overlooking Monterey Bay, where Santa Cruz community members and students spelled out “Safe Passage/Paso Seguro” with their interlocking bodies.

Each year, more than 20,000 whales migrate through these waters, passing Monterey Bay and the shores of San Diego as they journey thousands of miles between their feeding and breeding grounds. Along the way, they face numerous threats, including entanglement in commercial fishing nets, noise pollution, agricultural runoff, and collisions with ships. Without equating their experiences, Caycedo draws a parallel to the many migrant families detained and disappeared by the Trump administration, evoking a broader reflection on the violence of borders and the efforts deployed by the state to restrict the movement of people.

Bodies are our first and foremost tool. We carry our knowledge in our bodies. To be able to put your body together with others to create a collective, it shows anyone that no matter where you are, no matter your circumstances, there’s always a possibility of hope.

CAROLINA CAYCEDO, “Paso Seguro”: Demanding Safe Passage For All

DISCUSS
What are daily practices of memory-keeping you engage in that might contribute to the creation of a living archive?

Credits:
Videography by John Raedeke
Installation shots by Glen Cheriton