On November 13, 2025, Visual Studies grad students took part in a workshop led by Dr. Winnie Wong, a professor in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley who specializes in fakes, forgeries, and counterfeits. Titled “Archives and Futurisms: (Auto-)Ethnographies of Writing,” the workshop explored different modes of writing about asymmetrical archives, or what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation.” In preparation, students read a selection of short texts of speculative fiction and conjectural history, including Samuel Delany’s “About 5,750 Words” (1978), excerpts from Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale (1992), a transcript of Hilary Mantel’s 2017 BBC interview “The Day is for the Living,” and a piece by Wong from the series Conjectures, in which contributors write about historical figures who never existed but could plausibly have.
The texts opened up a conversation about conventions of art historical writing that are often taken for granted. Have certain routine practices—such as referring to historical objects exclusively in the past tense—taken on an unwarranted explanatory power that limits the kinds of narratives we can tell about them? Are there languages that allow us to imagine the relationship between past, present, and future differently than English does? Students were encouraged to consider inventing new words, tenses, and ways of communicating the specific temporal and material conditions in which they find their objects and locate their research. They were also invited to examine the relations that orient them towards particular archival objects—what happens in the time that has elapsed between engagements with those objects, and what regimes of knowledge bring one to a renewed position of interpretation.