Bettina Malcomess is a writer and an artist based in Johannesburg where they teach interdisciplinary studio practice at Wits School of Arts. Occasionally working under the name Anne Historical, their artistic practice inhabits multivocality and density, embodied research and material investigation. Malcomess' writing and research looks for new archival vocabularies, ways to rethink the densities of historical material in a present marked by urgent ecological and political questions. Since 2016 Malcomess has been producing work with analogue film, light and sound that inhabits the entanglement of memory, technology and history: a series of unfinished articulations in counterpoint voices, an attempt to queer the signal. Malcomess recently completed a PhD based in Film Studies at Kings College London. Recent exhibitions include Sentimental Agents (Galerie Nagl Draxler, Berlin 2022) and Wits Art Museum (2024), an installation of digital and analogue films engaging the archives and memorials of South African War, forming part of her recently completed Film Studies PhD at Kings College London, a media archeology of cinema and the colonial use of information technology. She is one of the co-authors of Mapping the Sensible: distribution, inscription and cinematic thinking (de Gruyter, 2023). She is also co-author of the well loved Not No Place: Johannesburg, Fragments of Spaces and Times (Jacana, 2013). Malcomess runs a platform for experimentation called joining room and in 2021 produced the collaborative vinyl and publication: Proximal Distal: Sonic Passages working with artists from Maputo, Joburg, Berlin and Basel.