Symposium: Archives, Art and Activism, London 3-5 September 2015

Points for discussion: Facing incompleteness. Here the relationship between the incomplete body of an archive and the virtual recreations of its body is explored in terms of interpretation, remembering, and making sense. The intrinsic dynamics of creating and using archives are addressed here. Archives are embodiment of actions, which in the first place create objects, writings, drawings, etc. At the same time archives perform actions themselves through recordings, scanning, etc. creating other forms of embodiment, new line of actions. The task of the scena setter is to respond to the intrinsic form of activism implied in archives, in terms of action produced by a body and then recreated through bodies in action.

This paper/intervention takes its starting point in The Event Series, an art project exploring the potential for site-specific performative art in gentrified urban city centres. It is concerned with questions of access and power-relations in the public space, exploring the relation between the geographical and architectural site and the presence/absence of bodies, actions and voices. The Event Series aims at working with existing situations, yet providing events in which we gain a new, refreshed comprehension of our situation of being in the world together with others. Exploring the artistic practice I use, I will in this paper outline strategies for moving between being affected and transforming that experience into action and compositions. I use a choreographic practice, which I define as an embodied labour of attentiveness, a visceral somatic listening to the affective impact of the site. It involves perceiving the site as an archive of events that are acted out as a repertoire. Composing the works is to create interplay of the visual, verbal and haptic qualities, and to choreograph actions, situations and energies. I’m interested in the affective impact of the works, and the capacity of each bodymind to shift its affection (i.e. being affected) into action. Link to PDF with images here.

The session presents one finishing and one starting project attempting to provide new ways of understanding old materials:
1. Cecilia Lindhé, Curating Mary Digitally: Representations of Medieval Material Culture in Installations and Online Archives
The talk will explore some digital interactive installations and an archive of medieval materiality that have been developed as a part of the research project Imitatio Mariae – Virgin Mary as Virtuous Model in Medieval Sweden. The project has collected about five thousand photographs and video-recordings from around sixty medieval Swedish churches. In order to put the images of the Madonna sculptures in a context of the multisensous and performative medieval church space, we have developed prototypes for a site-specific digital installation (using high resolution screens, sensors, directional sound and light). The ambition is to create an interface that is structured by categories that emerge from medieval rhetoric and its emphasis on performance, persuasion and space. The conceptual and theoretical framework of the installations and archive are based on ancient and medieval rhetoric, especially the concepts memoria, ductus and ekphrasis/enargeia. The aim of the installations and the archive is not only to orchestrate the Swedish medieval church as a multimodal and performative space, but furthermore to initiate a discussion on the format of the archive as such, and also to critically visualize the Virgin Mary’s journey from cult object to art object.

2. Mats Malm, Conjuring up the Artist from the Archives: Ivar Arosenius
Over-all presentation of the project which asks 1: how can our understanding of an artist be deepened and developed through digital materials and methods? 2: How can we, from this stand-point, analyze previous practices of conjuring up, modifying and creating artists and works of art in museum exhibitions, publications and studies? What ideological and practical considerations and presuppositions have governed the presentations that have formed the artist for the public consideration?

3. Jonathan Westin & Alexandra Herlitz (presented by Jonathan Westin), Assembling Arosenius: staging a digital archive
To digitise is to disassociate a material from its physicality, an ocularcentric act where multisensory qualities are translated into a purely visual form without depth. However, this disassociation allows for a mobility that makes the material reach beyond artificial contexts such as collections and archives and provoke new associations. This project, Arosenius 4-ever, aims to investigate how material from the newly digitised archive of artist Ivar Arosenius can be activated as a narrative device to trace the relation between artist and subject. While the digital archive is without material depth, it allows us to stage a meeting where the object of the artist’s gaze is given voice, and the distance between them is renegotiated. As such, the art and archive of Arosenius are being repositioned as equal residues of a meeting, their association a hybrid that has the potential to give body to tensions and affect to relations. Presentation can be found here.

The Arts Archives Consultancy (Judy Vaknin & Victoria Lane) has been working with the artist and activist Barbara Steveni (initiator and founder member of the Artist Placement Group, APG). In Steveni's performance work 'I AM AN ARCHIVE' (2002-) she activates the key moments in the history of APG. Initially, Judy and Victoria’s work was to organise and list Steveni’s personal papers, but the process has produced conversation-based interventions, which have proposed other possible contextual layers to archiving. Alongside Steveni, her assistant Melinda Bronstein has also been involved with the discursive aspect of the archive, and in developing its new direction. This has resulted in filming our discussions, cataloguing the work in Steveni's house, where the archive is based. This paper will focus on the importance of Steveni’s writings in her archive as an embodiment of action, thought and memory with some excerpts from the films. [Link to pdf, to be confirmed]

As part of her artistic practice, Barby has explored archival material in the broadest sense from ethnographic photographs, popular ephemera, movement and embodied texts and recording stories. Drawing on the experience of her artistic research Barby will lead participants through dialogic exercises to actively explore the effects and possibilities of the unheard and the missing. There will be particular emphasis on reframing and embodying story through re-enactment and how the use of this strategy may provide a possibility to further these discussions and open doors to challenging conversations. How can these spaces offer creative opportunities to interject, intervene and disrupt dominant narratives and histories? Can the act of collecting, proposing or activating material for archive generate conversations and actions that go beyond the limit of the material? How can the archive/ creation of/ collecting of archive make sense of contemporary conditions with regard to the visibility or invisibility of people of colour in the political, social and cultural experience of so called multicultural communities?

A video from Barby Asantes workshop can be found here. Credits: Direction and idea: Alda Terracciano. Photo and editing: Natalia Kouneli. Photo: Linda Sternö.

Points for discussion: Elicitation of narratives through archives. Here the task is to elucidate the power of witnessing events, and how these can be imported within a performative context. The experience of an event can have a strong impact on witnesses, audience etc., so how do we recompose a performance through a multiplicity of voices? When it comes to archives of performance, what kind of methodology can be applied? How do we reconcile different narratives to shed light on past events? 

2.00-2.45 Invited scena setter – Liz Stanley, University of Edinburgh, UK, Troubles in archives: misleading assemblages, awkward activisms and trickster traces

This presentation addresses the scena-setting task in two linked ways. Firstly, it relates the scena theme of narrative to the overall symposium focus on archives, art and activism. And secondly, it supports the group of shorter papers following it by exploring fault-lines within narrative inquiry and how these play out in relation to the archival turn. These fault-lines cohere around the artfulness of researcher assemblages, the provocations of some archival activisms, and the ontologically complicated character of archival traces.

The ‘Preface’ provides introductory comments on researcher positionality, the broad powerful and extremely influential ideas associated with the narrative turn, and some unresolved issues at the heart of narrative inquiry. Three aspects of the latter are then explored in more detail in the rest of the paper in relation to archives, art and activism.

‘Misleading assemblages’ explores researcher stories told about archives, using the Olive Schreiner Letters Online as a digital meta-archive and rejecting the idea of digital archives as totalising compendia. It does so in particular regarding to readers and users and ideas about construction, assemblage and accountability.

‘Awkward activisms’ is concerned with re/making archives from beneath, outside, beyond. It makes the point that such activism comes in many shades and there are often uncomfortable histories and heritages of collections and archives that need to be reckoned with.

‘Trickster traces’ points out the ‘by nature’ fragmentary and partial character of archival traces. This is in part because the traces always lack the context of the people, times, places and events that gave these their past meanings, and in part because what remains may be alien to present-time understandings and so tricky to comprehend.

A full version of the presentation can be accessed at www.whiteswritingwhiteness.d.ac.uk
Link to pdf with slides/PowerPoint here.

Archives hold the stories that underwrite and lend authority to the cultural and political practices of social groups, and as such, they are at the heart of contestations between completing visions of society and democracy. Activist archives are particularly rich sites in which to understand cultural and political narratives, and to question their effects. These archives document challenges to dominant narratives and contain the source material for counter-hegemonic narratives. They also provide a meeting space for social actors to construct and mobilize narratives within political struggles. Using the example of activist archives formed through and for anti-gentrification campaigns in London and Vancouver, I will discuss the role archives play in the production of political narratives. I will suggest that narratives are key in the formation of counter-publics, which have the potential to revitalize democratic participation.  

As an activist whose primary interest in archiving grew out of a desire for a continued political dialogue with different audiences, I will reflect upon my experience of providing a 21st century frame of reference to an online exhibition/archive of transatlantic slavery, Trading Faces - Recollecting Slavery. Which narratives get privileged not just in the encounter between the mainstream and its margins but when conflicting narratives arise on the margins? My research on modern-day slavery met resistance from black communities who felt that it diminished their own history. Paradoxically, refusing to see the continuum with modern day slavery allows us to put it safely in the past and to make our peace with it. To argue that modern day capitalism continues to benefit from it is to raid history for political lessons to change contemporary realities (Rahila Gupta)

As originator and curator of the Trading Faces online exhibition, I will briefly discuss the experience of researching the heritage of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in British performing arts, focussing on the dialogic approach adopted for the curatorial practice, and more specifically the cross-cultural and inter-generational consultation process adopted during the selection of archival documents and audio-visual material for digitisation and public engagement. Aspects of the design of the online portal will be discussed with reference to the African practice of ‘Orature’ - which implies a circularity of knowledge and a creative exchange between performers and members of the audience – as an attempt to re-create a ‘total artistic act’ of cultural resistance. (Alda Terracciano)
 

We will explore the creative expression of identity embedded in the archive of mental health recovery stories and offer our perspectives on the relationship between archives and art and the potential within creative archival spaces for personal and collective activism and empowerment.

The creation of the Moravian archive in Herrnhut, Sachsen, in 1764 was indeed a forward-looking and crafty act. As the Moravian church was global, individualistic and anti-hierarchical (in a vertical sense) the organization was based on personal relationships and correspondence between the leaders in Herrnhut and the diaspora-workers and missionaries. When the charismatic leader and founder of the Moravian church, Nicholas Zinsendorf, died in 1760 it as obvious that the organisation needed a more systematic structure due to avoiding future disintegration. One of the most important solution for this challenge was to create a central archive in Herrnhut. The most important task for this archive was to collect all the memoirs (lebenslauf) that were written by of the members. The idea was simply to file the individual life-experiences of every Moravians.

Since the establishment of the Moravian archive at Herrnhut, 250 years ago, there has been collected tenths of thousands of memoirs. These “lebenslaufs” are not “dead” material, on the contrary, it is still used and red as edification for other members and followers. In the archive at Herrnhut the bulk of the records consists of individual memoirs of “ordinary” peoples’ life-experiences. And that is memoirs that still are in “use”. The aim of the presentation is firstly to discuss how the archive in Herrnhut, and later the archive in Bettleheim (Penn), actually saved the Moravian church from dissolution and secondly analyse the actual function and content of the Moravian memoirs. Particularly interesting is that the memoirs at the same time as they created emotions it was, at the same time, controlled and calmed. The writing and reading of the memoirs created a sort of calm passion among the Moravians that had a profound impact on later movements as Methodism, Swedenborgianism etc. Also you, perhaps, can argue for that the moravian memoirs became an important source for the creation of modern literature. As an historical source in has many interesting aspects and use, one is the memoirs give an interface that few or no other sources can give. In one way they look with a modern eye on the world.

In 1978 the Swedish author and activist Sven Lindqvist published Gräv där du står (Dig Where You Stand (DWYS)). Inspired by the understanding that ‘History is dangerous. History is important because the results of history are still with us’, Lindqvist’s book was a detailed manual to Do-It-Yourself historical research aimed at workers because ‘Factory History could and should be written from a fresh point of view – by workers investigating their own workplaces’. Lindqvist’s writing and talks resulted in many DWYS groups and initiatives being set up in Sweden, Germany and the UK. Taking Lindqvist’s work as an inspiration and a model this paper will briefly outline the history and principles of the DWYS movement, the significance of participatory history-making and archiving; and most importantly will describe the researchers ongoing collaborative work towards producing a critical re-imagined Dig Where You Stand approach, grounded in the interstices and contact zones between creative, artistic, activist and academic approaches to digital archiving, public history and knowledge-production. Link to pdf with slides/PowerPoint here.
 

Jason E. Bowman will examine his 2010 project Untitled (on a day unknown), commissioned by the Whitworth Art Gallery. Bowman worked with Out in the City, a group of LGBTQ senior citizen, to exhume then re-iterate a court case of a group of 29 men tried for homosexual crimes in 1936 in a small English town. From multiple archival resources - newspaper reports, criminal and court records etc. – the trial, its mediation within popular press and its meanings within a culture of inter-war years surveillance were re-traced. Via a performative reiteration of the trial, held in private, a series of pinhole photographs and a suite of drawings, conducted from memory by an official court artist were produced then co-exhibited. Jason will discuss the relations between the psychoanalytic culture of shame, the performativity of the legal body, and of scavenging amidst a historiography of surveillance as a method to ingeminate the queered archive as a site of trauma, violence and inspection. Link to pdf with slides/PowerPoint here.

We will explore the distinctions between narratives focussing on pathologising systems and narratives focussed on experience, by asking participants to create and/or read placards to questions from each of those differing positions. We will then ask: Can story become protest to pathology? Can you create archives without pathologising? What are the issues that arise? Can art provide narrative too painful for words? There will be some pre-prepared placards to prompt discussion as well as blank ones so people don't have to share personal experience.