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press: Portfolio by Anri Sala An installation memorializes history and music.

One might call Sala’s mixing-up a form of archiving and a realization that all histories, violent and otherwise, comingle like sound or the skin-upon-skin of an arm cradling an instrument so that its noise might not be lonely. This phenomenon recalls feminist historian Joan Scott’s formulation of a “fantasy echo” which presents history and the psyche as a series of necessarily tenuous strands from which we create a narrative/love/music: “Retrospective identifications, after all, are imagined repetitions and repetitions of imagined resemblances. The echo is a fantasy, the fantasy an echo; the two are inextricably intertwined” (Joan Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History, 2011). All narratives or scores are made up only of the foggy and intermingling stuff of wish fulfillment that sometimes moves at a snail’s pace, at others like the sound of an expectant door swinging open, at other times like booming subterranean thunder.