Paige Smith
I Saw You in the Archive

I Saw You in the Archive is a multidisciplinary exhibition that reveals the history of eugenic practices in Kitchener-Waterloo in the mid 20th century. The exhibition questions how the framing of history impacts our personal understandings of each other’s identities. Mixing visuals associated with institutional archives and rubber factories, the artworks examine the former Kaufman Rubber Company and its owner A. R. Kaufman’s attempts to contain certain types of people, particularly those deemed ‘feeble-minded’. The exhibition embodies my experience parsing through this complicated history as a queer and neurodiverse woman—digging through a cacophony of propaganda pamphlets, shoe sale reports, instruction manuals for birth control use, blueprints of the factory, and photography of the workers. Seen through video documentation, I reintroduce remnants from the archive to the contemporary condominium that was formerly the rubber factory, connecting past rhetoric to today’s circumstances. The complicated layers of eugenics, birth control access, disability rights, and feminism seep into each other and spill into the gallery. Through use of performance and site-specific interventions, I challenge the internal shame many who have been othered experience and resist systems of containment that aim to erase our identities.