A few months ago, I underwent four surgeries to remove two wisdom teeth. Long and painful, they took from me solid parts with strange shapes \u2014 a friend, on seeing one of the pieces, said it looked like a shark\u2019s tooth! It was a slow, drawn-out experience: after each surgery, I had to recover before starting the next stage of the same process. During each one, I heard the dentist and her assistants discussing how stubbornly that tooth was attached to my skull.<\/p>\n Before each of the surgeries, on entering the office, I had to prove to the receptionist that I, who had booked the appointment, was who I claimed to be. She consulted a file whose history was unknown to me. \u201cYou\u2019ve been here with us before, haven\u2019t you?\u201d \u2014 a sign that something had been recorded about me, without my knowing exactly what. On each of these occasions, after I passed through the reception and the waiting room, I would see a piece of my skull printed in blue on a screen. There, hidden away, was a tooth that should not have been there.<\/p>\n Over the course of those months, many people \u2014 I don\u2019t know exactly who they were \u2014 accessed that image before accessing my body. I remember when I picked up the first removed piece: something that had been hurting inside me was suddenly transformed into a blur on a screen, and shortly afterward into small, solid, stained parts. That tooth left my body only once \u2014 but I wonder whether its record continues to circulate.<\/p>\n Through this experience, I came to share an unease similar to the one that anthropologist Mariza Peirano (2014) described feeling in a different context, that of biometric electoral re-registration: what was I doing at the dentist\u2019s? Was it a surgery or, even under anesthetics and pain, ethnography? Or both? I had realized that an extension of my body, before being removed, had become a discrete unit of information.<\/p>\n Seven pieces of the author\u2019s two wisdom teeth, arranged from the largest (left) to the smallest (right). Between the fourth and fifth fragments lies an ethically collected equine incisor. Photo taken by the author.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n My body was decomposed and abstracted from its typical contexts of existence and then reorganized through a series of data flows: I found myself before my own disembodied body, before what the sociologist Kevin Haggerty and the economist Richard Ericson (2000) named a \u201cdata double\u201d of pure virtuality.<\/p>\n It was out of this displacement \u2014 of a piece of my body that now exists outside it, portable and catalogable \u2014 that I began to build a small biometric archive. A simulation that would make visible the fragmentation of the subject into records that never align, and that, precisely for this reason, produce no stable representation.<\/p>\n In archives, we find exactly the kinds of things that the sociologist Susan Star (1999), referring to infrastructures, called boring \u2014 lists of numbers, forms, records, identifiers, standardized images. Here, I seek to make non-boring (or ethnographically alive) what normally blends into the background.<\/p>\n The historian Ann Laura Stoler (2009), studying Dutch colonial archives, proposes that such territories should not be read solely in search of their silences, but also along the grain of what they insist on recording, and of the way in which they record. Colonial archives were, in her account, sites of epistemic anxiety: full of hesitations, traversed by classifications that overlapped and contradicted one another. There, the act of cataloging involved the insecurity of producing certainties in a world that escaped the colonial State.<\/p>\n From this I take an observation: the incompleteness we experience before biometric archives circulating in the data centers of megacorporations seems to be a property of archives as such. Systems that must catalog produce, alongside their records, their own zones of anxiety and obscurity \u2014 gaps, redundancies, and records that exist to mark the impossibility of other records. The gesture I propose seeks a speculative construction that reproduces the \u201carchive-form\u201d by making visible, on a small scale, properties that biometric archival infrastructures, in their normal functioning, conceal.<\/p>\n![\"Seven](\"http:\/\/blog.castac.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/08\/WhatsApp-Image-2026-08-12-at-16.54.12.jpeg\")
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