Archive Room, 2025 by Wantanee Siripattananuntakul

Archive Room is a mixed-media installation spanning three interconnected rooms. It assembles documents, photographs, and objects accumulated through years of living with Beuys, the artist’s African Grey parrot. Veterinary reports, import and quarantine papers, microchip records, ownership declarations, and bureaucratic classifications sit alongside toys, food packaging, medical supplies, feathers, and traces of domestic wear. Together, they form a record of a shared life that is continuously translated into proof.

Viewed collectively, the archive reveals the systems that structure Beuys’s existence: care, attention, and companionship on one hand, and legality, surveillance, risk management, and economic labour on the other. Each document demands verification of species, ownership, and health. Each object points to the continuous, largely invisible work required to sustain another body within human infrastructures of control.

The installation argues that, under contemporary regulatory systems, care is inseparable from administration. To care is to document, to comply, and to translate affection into acceptable forms of evidence. Intimacy is repeatedly reorganised into files, forms, and procedures. While Beuys appears in the artist’s practice as an autonomous presence, institutional systems continue to frame her as a regulated subject, classified as a “pet” and subjected to inspection and bureaucratic oversight.

The rooms expose how interspecies life generates layers of documentation shaped by affection, legality, and political economy. The accumulation of papers and objects does not stabilise identity or ownership. Instead, it reveals how care itself is produced through structures of control, responsibility, and vulnerability.

Moving through the fragmented arrangement, visitors become readers of an entangled life in which every object registers both a shared domestic world and the administrative systems that govern it. The archive does not preserve certainty. It makes visible how histories, relationships, and forms of care are continually shaped, filtered, and re-authored through regulatory frameworks.

Archive Room examines how intimacy operates within regimes of documentation and power. By assembling personal traces and institutional records in the same space, the work exposes the conditions under which care becomes legible, legitimate, and permitted. It reflects on how lives that cross species boundaries are sustained not only through affection but through continuous negotiation with legal, economic, and bureaucratic systems.