ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

John Manton

In my work as an artist, I am interested in how we make sense of the records of our past, how we build, share, and contest histories, how we understand the hold that storytelling has on us, and how we shake it loose, even if only for a moment. To help shake the hold of narrative, and maybe look at its components with a fresh eye, I make art across a variety of media, including video and sound work, painting and drawing, sculpture, and photography. My works layer and braid audio and visual archival material, together with the marks made over years of drawing, the offcuts of an academic career as a historian and anthropologist, and photos from homes I’ve lived in and from fieldwork in the history of global health.

I’ve attended EAHMH as a historian many times, and I carried out historical and anthropological research on disease control and scientific research in Nigeria and Cameroon, and on health systems and development in Africa and Southeast Asia based at several universities in the UK.  At EAHMH 2023, I invoke some of this work – on moments of crisis in personal, institutional, and national histories of health and wellbeing – in a series of exhibited pieces, a performance, and a workshop. The exhibition pieces can be encountered in central conference spaces, and will include video works: the displayed and linked works all draw on our relation with archives of medical and humanitarian responses to crises.

The performance and workshop bring out different aspects of ‘making with archives’. In the performance, I will interact with prepared video, textual, and photographic material available in the exhibition, to consider relations between narrative and historical meaning-making. Participants in the workshop (which may be limited by space) are encouraged to bring copies – not originals! – of archival documents or photos with them, to develop new ways of looking at materials with which we are too familiar. Further details are available in the conference program.