“An Overhead Shot of Gloved Hands Opening An Acid-Free Box” is a collective publication consisting of 10 zines by Alexandra Corodan, Amina Bamieh, Celeste Mae, Ema Benčíková & Mmametsi Claus, Jasemin Khaleli, Joanna Zoe, Martina Lajczak, Natália Zajačiková, Laura Egger-Karlegger, and Robin Ilian Grossmann.

The publication was organized by Guilherme Maggessi, Rafał Morusiewicz, and Ruby Sircar as an invitation to the students of the Master in Critical Studies to create and produce riso-printed zines that focus on specific nodes within their own research projects. Below you will find a detailed documentation of each respective zine.

The author investigates into the postcards produced by “the American Colony“ during the Mandate time in Palestine, aiming to establish in what ways these “visual tools” were used to market land and power to Western audiences, with the focus on the recurring image motif of vast unpopulated landscapes acting as a persuasive propaganda tool.

Methods: visual analysis, decolonial narrative-making

The author engages in the self-referential analysis of their own creative research process with “direct references,” which they conceptualize as “ready-mades” and which function in their work as elements of the collaging practice, fragments of their “personal archive,” a type of “embodied archives.” These fragments include direct quotes from novels, essays, poems, and films, to name just a few.

Methods used: tracing, writing.

The author engages with the family archive of a Vienna-based Asian diaspora, centered around the defunct grocery shop in the city’s second district.

Methods: storytelling, mapping

The authors investigate into the care structures practiced during the peak years of the AIDS epidemic, with the goal of understanding how communities and groups formed and/or adapted their activity in order to provide care work.

Methods: oral history investigation, recording

The author focuses on the example of the Phonogrammarchiv (PhA, Austrian Academy of Sciences) to investigate into the specificity of bodily sites and anatomies that produce modes of knowledge, while zooming in on the institution’s history of extractivist (colonial, imperial, Nazi) entanglements throughout its 100 years in the Liebiggasse premises (until 2025).

Methods: fieldwork

The author investigates into ways of archiving activism and the forms that community archives or “archives of the commons” can take, with the focus on the concept of “counter-cartography” as the guiding idea for creating and sharing open-access maps of protest movements and demonstrations.

Methods: web design

The author investigates into the interrelations between the various meanings of “braiding,” conceptualized as an embodied practice of braiding hair in response to gendered societal expectations, associating unbraided long hair with “dangerous femininity,” and as an ecological phenomenon: braided rivers occur rarely and produce unique habitats with plant and animal communities.

Methods: drawing

The author investigates into the origins, dissemination histories, and socio-political contexts of the “Grave in the Lake” myth about Lake Erlauf (Erlaufsee), focusing on the ways of interacting with them from the present-day situated perspective.

Methods: Archive query (Österreichische Mediathek), mindmap, field recordings

The author investigates the idea of the (queer) body as an archival site, or as a site that archives illness, disability, and death, experienced materially, on the tissue level, and psychologically/symbolically, as a form of trauma.

Methods: sculpture, workshop, performance