PORTAL THEORY
Digital Selves and The Archive of Us: exploring the vantage of Epistemological irrelevance
BY VANDA FOCANTI
new york city, the new school, 2025
This essay explores the making of a joint digital archive documenting my friendship with dancer and artist Lily Ndiaye; unpacking the philosophic, poetic, and personal implications of curating such a project in the contemporary digital age.
In the contemporary digital age, the archiving of personal relationships befalls cyber-citizens with undetected automatism. Taking two average social media users who habitually engage with one another on and offline, it could be speculated that an overview of their chat history, shared stories1, call logs, emails, and exchanged social media contents, would likely render some sort of portrayal of the friendship at hand. The average person’s online presence, while oftentimes promoting a heavily edited or embellished performance of the self, could also, in some ways, clue an outside observer into an approximation of what that individual may be like in the physical world. Political tendencies, events attended, communities of interest (followed by and following), physical appearance, personal taste, disparate opinions, biographical timelines, geolocation, languages spoken and other cultural specificities (popular, internet specific, or regional), are all part of the self that is stored in the digital sphere– publicly. Arguably, many of these categories can be simulated, but imagining the profile of someone who is not outwardly impersonating somebody else and does not have fraudulent motives, a lot of information is willfully surrendered. Besides, perhaps even the commitment to a lie can reveal something of what an individual deems important. One can hardly linger on this thought, however, before being confronted by the ghastly presence of private chat logs, search histories, spam and priority emails, service subscriptions, digital storage spaces, social media archives, liked and saved content— which all make up another slice of self, slightly more shielded (possibly more earnest) and definitely available to companies who deal in the currency of personal data.
The generation of individuals that grew up on social media has semi-unconsciously participated in an ongoing archiving of the self– wherein the sense of euphoric affirmation that is derived from the creation of a longstanding personal narrative meets the profiling and the digital interpellation that this system implies. The concept of digital interpellation is my attempt to remix Althusser's notion of hailing2 and the ungodly self surveillance that takes place in virtual topographies– (dis)utopian lands in which we have forsaken our consciousnesses3. The birth of the digital self that, for instance, took place for people of my generation (born circa 1999) during preadolescence, has bred in these individuals an iterative sense of identity. Here, a cyclical division of the self can reconcile or contrast the new promotional goals of one's personhood for an array of purposes (commercial, social, erotic, dissociative, educational…). This generation has thus been able to observe their own lives unfold through an unprecedented historical lens wherein the documented shedding of one’s past self leaves a (im)material trail– a digital snakeskin. As our timelines collapse into pixelated folders, the empirical understanding of growth and the savage bleeding of human time are reformatted to the way digital platforms compute information. The old poets might allow one to imagine what it must have been like to lasso the remnants of a life archived only in memory but, personally, I struggle to conceive what that exercise of the mind and spirit must have felt like. I can not know how I might have felt about my life had my mind been free from the timeline that I accidentally provided Google Photos. There is something deeply pathetic about knowing the machine that dictates our personal epistemologies is gently nestled in the palm of our hands4–we have exited Plato’s cave only to scramble right back to its stifling enclosure.
Life today seems to unfold in tandem with the production and reproduction of a self which, at first glance, seems to be generated for the benefit of oneself or one's community, but more broadly, offers that profile to the network of oligarchies running the capitalist matrix. The commodification of identity could not come to be if it weren’t accompanied by what can be described as the implicit archival project that is kickstarted when entering the cyberscape.
The innate personal archives that make up the social contract of the internet, run in parallel to institutional archives, posing themselves as their somewhat illicit (or at least non-academic) counterparts. One could argue that the root from which both kinds of archives stem has to do with a project of power; although– after technology’s renovation of the imperial world– the hegemonic stakes of the archives of the past differ or are rendered partially obsolete by those constructed within the contemporary capitalist project. The archival tradition of institutions that produce epistemologies has functioned, historically, to curate imperial/national narratives that may aid the ideological projects of different regimes. Engaging critically with the history of the archive, then, is to address the subjugation embedded in the negative space of such archives. Peering into the haunted crevices of history in order to restore narrative is the imperative of many decolonial, queer and feminist archival pursuits. As an artist, contemplating the rupture of traditional archival practices and utilizing said spaces as sites of remaking is a prerogative that I feel compelled to endorse, but, as the conversation on archival matters evolves, and the technological advancements that produce archivable materials and presences expand into unthinkable realms, I question how to employ a critical lens that takes into account the archival productions that engage in non-institutional forms of knowledge production serving a capitalist agenda. Put simply, I don’t know what to do with all the information that exists, is constantly regenerated to a degree of absurdity, and will likely bury us all.
Personal archives are a frail and bittersweet affair, their precarity timidly stumbling alongside the mortal inconsistency of human timelines. The archival project that I have been undertaking with my best friend, devoting ourselves to the history of a conversation that started and never ended (but one day might), is redundant in the context of a digital landscape that exceeds us in the pursuit of keeping a record and irrelevant to institutions that are interested in producing contemporary epistemologies that may aspire to delineate a new entropic worldview. However, a form of resistance might just be found in the capriciousness of a task that takes time, as the indulgence of time is in and of itself a resistance to the subjugation intrinsic to capitalism. It follows, that the indulgence of redundancy is perhaps a poetic act perfectly suitable for the digital sphere. Perhaps it is my hope that the production of a personal epistemology (as a project that exists in its own independent form of literacy) can counter the weight that is placed on institutional forms of knowledge production, while exercising one’s humanity in the whirlwind of cyber-information that is reshaping how we conceive Human{people[in the world(physically)]}. What outcome this may produce on an individual (or dare I say larger) scale I am still unsure of; however, something warm and human washes over me as I find agency in the slowness and irrelevance of The Archive of Us.
The following is a brief overview of how “The Archive of Us” came to be. The subtitle I had crafted when the portion of text you are about to read was its own standalone essay was “Archival kinship for new epistemologies”, which I believed would summarize my eagerness to pursue an epistemology of misconstruction while also acknowledge how irrisory it would be to believe that I could pursue such a task on my own.
In an effort to capture everything you are to me and the ways in which you have enriched my life, I once said of our most special entanglement:
It is a conversation that started at some point and never ended
you promptly mended this statement:
and it began before we were born.
You have always found a way to prolong the life of my utterances, ushering my thoughts into words just beyond my reach. When I am alone, every-thing is possible, when I am with you, any-thing is possible. The first sentence here speaks to a finite world I can draw from, wherein "every-thing" is accompanied by the subtext (that I know of). “Every” refers to the completeness of a methodology unchallenged, and “any” broadens the scope of possibilities when our now conjoined methodology is nourished by our differences. I met you at a time in my life when anything was possible, and, as I grow into my choices and file down my options, your friendship ensures I still make the effort of seeing what is not there. My relationship to you is my most fascinating project yet, one where the intimate understanding of who we are meets the infinite pursuit of unmaking of who we thought we were.
In 2021, we had the idea of making a podcast to discuss the radical texts we had been exposed to during our undergraduate studies. We were flushed with excitement as we mapped out our ideas on a shared google drive. One fateful afternoon, we decided to record the first episode—we rented out all the right equipment and locked ourselves in my odd little room near Kings Cross Station. We switched on the microphone (one for the two of us), and suddenly you and I were not alone anymore— my voice began to tremble and I forgot what to say; you were disappointed and a bit confused. The project met its failure as our first episode swiftly turned into our last. You and I were never the type to force things, favoring authenticity above all. At any rate, we were not left with nothing: we still had a Google Drive.
Over the course of three years, this digital space became a shared archive of our research and resources, but, more surprisingly, it became the site where we decided to record the evolution of our friendship. After university, we had both relocated to our home countries, so our digital archive became the solemn bridge connecting two people who loved the same things and led very different lives. We flooded the Drive with voice recordings, personal writings and videos documenting our yearly gatherings. Since 2022, we have only seen each other in person once every year. Even so, your voice is the one that rings most familiar, and I value your opinion as if my eyes and ears were your own. It only felt natural when we began uploading our Whatsapp voice messages to the Archive of Us…
What shall we do with the Archive of Us? What purpose does it serve?
We began referring to this unusual mission as Portal Theory (repurposing the title of our undead podcast) or, more colloquially, The Drive. We had fallen into a new project that was predicated on the inkling that in our kinship something larger was at play. As we started to understand friendship as something that “is never simply given, it is always constructed, and thus always under threat of deconstruction” (Derrida, 1994) we started indulging in the radical potential of making and unmaking each other. Our questions for the worlds we inhabit together and separately drove our need to love each other more deeply, and, as we cultivated a personal shared taste for love and beauty, we allowed each other the space to experiment as we collapsed the different forms of knowledge that fueled our criticisms and understandings of the world.
The pursuit of archiving both the information that nourished us and the progression of this relationship in parallel, echoes the framework described by Kathrine McKittrick in Footnotes (books and papers scattered about the floor)5. This text refers to a specific configuration of radical and decolonial knowledge production generated for and from within the black diaspora (which you are a part of and I am not), however, the methodology described by McKittrick speaks to the undulating boundaries we have set for ourselves in our intellectual, spiritual and platonic partnership. Looping in multiple different forms of knowledge (empirical, academic, textual, speculative, etc.) in a non-hierarchical and rhizomatic discourse has allowed us to never end the conversation. There is always more to everything, we will never rest on a fixed truth, I can only move forward in this tireless pursuit because you are there to push me, you can only make your claims because I am there to add a question mark.
O friend, there are no friends.
When we are together we are not the same, we are who we have always been (to each other and ourselves) and who we will never be again—always ourselves (to each other and ourselves). We are also complete within the context of our love. Derrida says to love your friend as if they could one day become your enemy. There are parts of our histories that perhaps would have scripted us as enemies, but what we have understood, and what Derrida teaches, is that the revolution we have often contemplated can not be achieved through sameness, through any appraisal of homogeneity. Individualism, however, does not oppose sameness. As Lola Olufemi posits “If we hold commitments and dreams to end violence, we must account for those who perpetrate it without banishment. The scope of our concern must extend beyond ‘I’—the individual person who we imagine exists in isolation—towards that ‘other’ who we imagine is separate from us.” Although we can find comfort in a home we have constructed to be shared, one where a psychic place of sameness is available to us as momentary shelter, you and I are essential interlocutors of the never ending conversation, of a circle of infinite points to be made.
I once wrote about chasing the ellipses, pointing towards the gaps in ourselves where a spectre of sorts may carry out a lonely haunting. You and I are haunted by very different spectres, but you have been with me since I truly began chasing ellipses. Avery Gordon writes that “the sociological imagination must be animated by a willingness to listen to the ghostly presences that shape our world, including the intimate spaces of kinship, friendship, and community. These relationships are never innocent; they carry the weight of history.” (Gordon, 1997, p. 134)
An elliptical shape is a circle viewed from a different angle, so perhaps we can conceive the intimacy of the points we cannot articulate (…) as reflected in the vastness of the circle (a sum of infinite points) that contains us.
You were the one who first spoke about the circle breaking, at least in this life. You wrote it down in these words:
“✧ Funny it’s a C.
✦ What C?
✧ The words, you just said it, capitalism and colonialism they both start with that letter. And it looks like a broken O. An incomplete circle.
✦ What do you mean a broken O?
✧ The letter C, it looks like a broken O. Whatever… I just thought it sounded kinda nice to say that.
This O is not just a circle, it’s the symbol of the conversation they started and never ended.”
(Ndiaye, Text 2.docx, The Shared Archive of Lily Ndiaye and Vanda Focanti, 2025).
1
A story is a short sequence of images, videos, or other social media content, which can be accompanied by backgrounds, music, text, stickers, animations, filters or emojis. Social media platforms typically advance through the sequence automatically when presenting a story to a viewer. Although the sequential nature of stories can be used to tell a narrative, the pieces of a story can also be unrelated. Social media platforms that offer stories will typically have a primary story for each user which consists of everything the user posted to their story over a certain period of time, usually the most recent 24 hours. Most stories cannot be changed afterwards and are only available for a short time. Stories are almost exclusively created on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet computer and are usually displayed vertically (Wikipedia)
2
"I shall then suggest that ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it 'recruits' subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or 'transforms' the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: 'Hey, you there!'" — Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
3
Bifo gestures towards the mutation taking place in our consciousness by distinguishing, in the following passage, the atomization of algorithmic stimuli that humans are fed by the mechanics of the digital sphere vs the organic conjunctions that materialize between conscious living beings that look to each other to construct communication styles and meaning: “When connection replaces conjunction in the process of communication between living and conscious organisms, a mutation happens in the field of sensibility, emotion, and affect”–Franco "Bifo" Berardi, And: Phenomenology of the End.
4
"Digital abstraction virtualizes the physical act of meeting and the manipulation of things. These new levels of abstraction concern not only the labor process, but they tend to encompass all spaces of social life. Digitalization and f inancialization are transforming the very fabric of the social body, and inducing mutations within it." –Franco "Bifo" Berardi, And: Phenomenology of the End
5
“The groundbreaking work by black women intellectuals, inside and outside the academy, provided and continues to provide an outlook wherein doing the work necessitates—has always necessitated— what VèVè Clark calls “diaspora literacy”: the ability to read and comprehend multifarious and overlapping discourses of the black diaspora from an informed and learned perspective”.
6
“How can we understand this phrase— in between? Perhaps as an ellipses, an overlooked intermission, that contains all of the generative forces that shape our lives, our politics, our ecosystems?To be in-between is to be a working component of a process of digestion, metabolization, it is to be a gurgling, babbling, foaming agent of synthesis. In-betweenness can be interpreted as the process of reassessment that pools in the middle of different states of command. It describes a longing, yes, but never a stillness.”-Focanti, Finding my Bearings, Calaca Mx, 2022.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:• Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
(Includes “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”)Berdardi “Bifo”, Franco. And: Phenomenology of the End. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2015.Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship.
• Berardi “Bifo”, Franco. And: Phenomenology of the End. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2015.Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins, Verso, 1997
• Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins, Verso, 1997
• Focanti, Vanda Finding my Bearings. Inter Calaca Mx, 2022
• Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
• McKittrick, Katherine. “Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered About the Floor).” In Dear Science and Other Stories, Duke University Press, 2021, pp. 14–34.
• Ndiaye, Lily. Text 2.docx. The Shared Archive of Lily Ndiaye and Vanda Focanti, 2025.
• Olufemi, Lola. Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. Hajar Press, 2021.
• Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
PICTURED BELOW: THE DRIVE
ABOUT VANDA AND LILY
Vanda Focanti is an Italian and Mexican multidisciplinary artist whose practice traverses painting, illustration, installation and performance. In 2022, Vanda obtained her bachelor’s in Art Curation and Cultural Studies at Central Saint Martins, London, where she met her creative counterpart and best friend, artist and dancer Lily Ndiaye.
Together, Vanda and Lily have been developing a conjoined practice documenting their friendship and their observations of the everyday affects produced by the systems of oppression (patriarchal and colonial) they inhabit. The duo’s understanding of reality is not merely one of deconstruction but rather one of misconstruction, where language is deformed by polyglot banter, inquiry is warped by humor, wit is inflated by tragedy and definitions are grossly misused for necessity. In this world, Whatsapp voice memos hold the same weight as academic texts and the pursuit of beauty is weaponized to break down societal configurations of normalcy.
In 2021, the two began calling these moments of recognition and revelation “Portals” and they began defining their shared practice of world building and exploring truth/fiction as “Portal Theory”. In 2023, Vanda debuted the “Portal Theory Manifesto” at the exhibition “La Stanza dei Manifesti (The Room of Manifestos)” hosted by the cultural collective Hercole, in Milan.
Today, Vanda lives in New York City, where she is pursuing a masters in Fine Arts at The New School (class of 2026) and Lily is based in Lausanne where she is completing her second bachelor’s degree in dance at Manufacture (class of 2026).
PICTURED BELOW: Lily and Vanda’s hands, entangled. south of France, 2024.
More writings on Portal Theory:
The Duffle Bag Theory of Fiction (2024) ⚜ The Portal Theory Manifesto (2023) ⚜ Inventing Sad Gorda (2022) ⚜ Inter - published with Calaca Mx (2022)
The Duffle Bag Theory of Fiction (2024) ⚜ The Portal Theory Manifesto (2023) ⚜ Inventing Sad Gorda (2022) ⚜ Inter - published with Calaca Mx (2022)
PORTAL THEORY