AnarKrew: An Anti-Archives navigated the confluences between the maritime imaginary, carnivalesque strategies and anarchist influences constitutive of the protest ethos of the city of Göteborg. AnarKrew, a play on words between [anarchy] and [crew] or krew identified the pirate ship crew and the carnival krew as proximate anarchists, like the boat is to the float. Setting out on an investigative journey that reinvented the origins of the city of Gothenburg in carnival and of carnival at sea based on the contested etymology [carrus navalis], AnarKrew straddled historical, fictional and mythological narrative modes.
Taking the archives of the forgotten Göteborg Carnival (1982-1993) as a starting point and the so-called Göteborg Riots (2001) as a temporary closure, AnarKrew set out on an undocumented journey into Göteborg’s counterculture and its wider ramification across Northern Europe. The use of the document in artistic and curatorial practice was tested as both artists and curator made use of archival material not so much to recover a lost era as to enable the emergence of a new one.
AnarKrew: An Anti-Archives opened to ANARKREW, a 90-minute multi-stop promenade punctuated by several performances along the way, claiming a geo-psychic territory that encompassed Götaplatsen, Kungsportavenyn, Esperantoplatsen, the port of Göteborg and the Nefertiti Jazz Club and continued with an exhibition at Göteborgs Konsthall and the project room at the Hasselblad Center as it sought to establish a dialogical space between disparate modes of knowledge production and complementary exhibitionary models.