Twitching, trembling, twinning, freckling is a proposal for a mixed-media installation responding to the archives of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. It features an immersive triple-channel video projection on the three main walls and a single large archival table at the center of the prospective gallery. The projection includes recent footage recorded at a livestock show at Bangor State Fair, ME; each screen alternates between close-up views, long shots and captions based on the diagnostic language used by eugenic fieldworkers to classify subjects as desirable and undesirable, fit and unfit. 

The table displays images and documents from Fitter Family contests held at state fairs across the US in the 1920s. These contests were part of a broader eugenics education program encouraging those from good “stock” to have larger families while collecting family pedigree data for research.

By combining video, text, archival images, and documents and subverting the different registers of time and space within an archive, the installation proposes history not as linear and complete, but as malleable, in flux, and constantly renegotiated. The viewer is invited to draw connections between past and present, revealing how the language and ideology of eugenics continue to inform contemporary discourse on genetics and to perpetuate harm today.