Same Old Story: Agential Realism in the Study of Colonial Histories

What are the possibilities of accessing the reality of history? How can we read history, and what can we learn from it? In this paper, we contemplate these questions by putting our ongoing research-creation project, Same Old Story (2020-present), in conversation with feminist critiques of objectivity and current discussions on the construction of historical narratives by historians, philosophers and artists, including Antoinette Burton, Andreas Huyssen, Walter Benjamin Walid Raad and Forensic Architecture. Specifically, we elaborate on how Karen Barad's "agential realism" ¹ informs our engagement with colonial histories in Same Old Story and speculate on its broader relevance in research-projects that engage with historical narratives. To do so, we describe the process of creating the current iteration of our project and offer a theoretical framework based on a discussion of three main themes, Archive/ Memory, Architecture and Monument/Counter-Monument. Building from this discussion, we elaborate on how to expand our work further, focusing on the possibilities and limits of revitalizing embodied realities in historical events and learning from them.