ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 is titled “Small Places.” It elaborates and deploys a branch of historiography called microhistories, which shifts the focus of history from the meta and grand narratives of nation-states to the smaller, the singular, and the everyday. This chapter also marshals relational art theory in the writings of Grant Kester that moves from the text to the context and from produce to process, developing out of and referencing the avant-garde in movements like Dada and Fluxus that featured place-based performance strategies. The chapter advances notions of microutopias, microterritories, and microhistories. It discusses how open space documentary projects move documentary beyond prescriptive narrative modalities into more heterogeneous collage strategies. The chapter argues that the linguistic turn in critical historiography, as evidenced in the writing of Michel Foucault and Hayden White, combines with the microhistorical method of Carlo Ginzburg and others to shift the focus on historical explanation away from unities and narrative towards contradiction, the everyday, collages, heterogeneities, signaling a move away from the macro to the micro. The chapter analyzes three projects that exemplify small place strategies: the Triangle Fire Open Archive (US) about the Triangle Fire women’s labor catastrophe in the early twentieth century; Abounaddara (Syria), about the war in Syria; and The Quipu Project (Peru/UK), about forced sterilization in Peru. Each collaborative projects explores the aftermath of political trauma. These projects concentrate on history as contradiction, paradox, fragments, heterogeneity, multiple voices, nonlinearity. They are all anchored in the everyday, the multiple, and the small place.
