November 20th 2020 | 14:00 – 16:00 | Online
This online workshop will explore digital material in relation to the archive. The workshop is the first in a series on ‘Animating Archives’, and asks: How can we creatively engage with archive material during times of physical closure?
Led by Dr Althea Greenan, the session aims to introduce PhD researchers to a range of creative approaches to working with archives that engage with the politics of representation and thereby providing a unique perspective on the relationship of archives, activism and collection digitization. This is especially critical to those who work with archives and cannot physically access them. This workshop starts from examples of practice in the Women’s Art Library collection now based in Special Collections at Goldsmiths, University of London.
To prepare for the workshop we ask participants to send in one digital object to introduce to the group as a something that has provided a reading of a collection they are working with. Please email this to Althea Greenan, a.greenan@gold.ac.uk. There are also some suggested readings to prepare for the workshop.
This workshop is for PhD researchers at CHASE-affiliated institutions, as well as interested artists, archivists and writers.
Spaces are limited to facilitate discussion.
Further information:
Looking at the Women’s Art Library through the digital material of photographs, powerpoints, Word documents, scans, artworks and publications, this workshop will demonstrate how researchers have explored and expanded on the creative work collected and the political work represented by the Women’s Art Library. The diversity of projects complicates the notion that digital recordings of archive objects make them more accessible and are a neutral form of preservation.
Dr Greenan will introduce her doctoral research on the WAL’s slide collection – effectively an image database held in a redundant technology – to scrutinize the implications of digitizing material collections initiated as political projects of self-archiving and community building. By questioning standard approaches to slide-scanning her research examines how the slide collection resists digitization. This section will include the screening of Slide Walking Talking commissioned for the exhibition Dark Energy: feminist organizing, working collectively (Vienna 2018). The Animating Archives website: https://sites.gold.ac.uk/animatingarchives/
Participants will then be invited to discuss the question of how researchers read digital objects in terms of physical community-building collections. To prepare for the workshop we ask participants to send in one digital object to introduce to the group as a something that has provided a reading of a collection they are working with. By focusing on experimental responses and accessibility issues that challenge the physical archive, the webinar will demonstrate the particular challenge of digitized delivery produced exclusively from digitized material available during the lockdown period.
Seminar Reading: Eichhorn, K., 2014. ‘Beyond digitisation: a case study of three contemporary feminist collections,’. Arch. Manuscr. 42, 227–237. https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2014.958866
Further Resources:
Dahlström, M., Hansson, J., Kjellman, U., 2012. ‘As We May Digitize’ — Institutions and Documents Reconfigured. Liber Q. 21, 455. https://doi.org/10.18352/lq.8036
“SAA Community Reflection on Black Lives and Archives”, Speakers: Zakiya Collier, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Dorothy Berry, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Courtney Chartier, Rose Library, Emory University, Erin Lawrimore, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, https://www.pathlms.com/saa/events/1996/video_presentations/162192
March 19th 2021 | 16:00- 18:30 | Zoom
How to reproduce the past via extension not replication?
Drawing from documents belonging to photographer, activist and historian Terry Dennett, held in the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive, the second Animating Archives workshop invites artist Winnie Herbstein to collaborate with workshop participants to discuss and re-enact written material from Dennett’s photography and literacy workshops.
Found amongst Terry Dennett’s records were minutes from a meeting of women at the Cambridge House social centre in Camberwell in 1975. These minutes document a discussion of the women’s needs and desires for a forthcoming photography and literacy workshop, organized by Dennett, as well as their struggles with the council, access to public funds and issues around work and childcare. Script-like, taken from real discussion but edited by the note taker and potentially Dennett, these minutes are a textual document of the concerns of working-class women and their families in London in the 1970s, and the grassroots pedagogical practice of Dennett and his collaborators.
This document will form the basis of the workshop and discussion. With Herbstein and invited speakers Noorafshan Mirza and Chris Jones, workshop participants will read through the minutes from the meeting as a script. After taking on the roles of the women, speaking their concerns as noted in the document, there will be a discussion of the issues at stake: of housing and access to resources and the right to represent oneself both in the 1970s and today.
The invited speakers will present their work on the issues that arise including social reproduction theory, co-operatively run arts organizations and housing struggle in London. Participants are encouraged to discuss their own research on these topics as well concerns around the ethics of re-performance of historical documents, identity, art as activism and any other issues that arise from the minutes and our group’s handling of them.
Workshop organised by Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe.
This workshop is aimed at PhD researchers who are working creatively and politically with archival material, but is open to all, although numbers are limited. Please sign up for the workshop via Eventbrite, and any questions can be sent to: asymon03@mail.bbk.ac.uk
Animating Archives blog: sites.gold.ac.uk/animatingarchives/
This series of events is funded by the CHASE consortium
Bios:
Terry Dennett was a photographer, social historian and workshop organiser. He was a long-term collaborator with Jo Spence and the principal archivist of her estate between her death in 1991 and his in 2018. As well mediating Spence’s legacy, Dennett’s preservation of her collaborative practice provides a mould for the history of radical portrait and documentary photography in Britain in the 1970s and 80s. This workshop focuses on Dennett’s practice both in its own right and as an example of how the histories of others that appear even in monographic archives.
Winnie Herbstein is an artist. Recent work focuses on gendered labour and materials, historical and contemporary forms of organising, and the architecture and formation of space. These are explored through practice-based research, finding their output in the medium of video and sculpture. She is currently researching for a film exploring histories of housing, health and activism in Glasgow.
Chris Jones is a long-term volunteer at radical social centre and archive 56a Infoshop in The Elephant and also member of the political sound art group Ultra-red focusing on housing struggles in The Elephant.
Noorafshan Mirza is an artist and writer, often working as an artist-duo with long term collaborator Brad Butler. Known for their Film and Video practice and exhibition making, Mirza and Butler have been co-directing award-winning artists’ Film and Video works for 23 years. Their awards and commissions include nomination for the Film London Jarman Award in 2012, The Artes Mundi Award 2015, and they were winners of Artist Film International 2015 and the Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual artists 2015. Their work has been commissioned by Artangel, the Hayward gallery, The Sydney Biennale, Film London, Film and Video Umbrella, the Serpentine Gallery and The Walker Arts Centre.
Mirza writes: “I visualise in fragments and love to collage. I both write and think in unstructured sentences. Communication: it is both a struggle and a pleasure to be legible. My writing is mostly visual in the form of filmmaking. I get a lot out of music, lyrically: I’m listening a lot to Little Simz, Agent Sasco, Alice Coltrane, Burna Boy, NX Panther. I’m an avid reader of poetry, it takes me to places where I can journey. I am a committed amateur boxer and Kundalini yoga student and have recently set up my own company to act as a football agent for talented players from the global south. The esoteric and healing arts are also a passion of mine. I am Piscean Sun, Capricorn ascendent and my moon is in Libra. As an artist of mixed class, caste and racial heritage, I have been on a long journey of decolonising myself, my education, my body, and my intimate relationships. I have simultaneously been unlearning and self-educating. I’ve always got a good book or two on me.”
Saturday 19th June 2021 | 11:00 – 16:30 | Zoom
Before you can animate an archive, you need to secure its location and make it accessible. And then, location and modes of access affect how the archive can be animated. This one-day symposium looks at the ways grassroots organisations, artists and curators have been in dialogue with archivists and library staff as they seek to preserve, provide access to, and animate their archives. The title “Challenging Archives” refers to both the challenges that these archives bring, and the challenges to archival convention that they provoke.
Focusing on collections based in London, two round-tables reveal the often hidden stories of how these archives have been relocated, digitised, and made accessible, from collecting policies, to negotiations about cultural value through to artistic interventions. The archives that are explored include: the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive at Birkbeck, The Feminist Library, The Bishopsgate Institute, MayDay Rooms, and the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths. These archives share urgencies around making materials secure, accessible and also making them known to an audience beyond specialist researchers. The roles of archivists, library managers, researchers, volunteers, artists, curators and activists all intersect in the stories of how these archives have taken their current shape and form.
The symposium is divided in two round-tables, which have overlapping focal points around the ways in which these particular case studies can talk to us about the politics of animating archives, and the work of preservation, relocation and cataloguing that takes place alongside.
Round-table one: The Politics of Preserving
This round table will think about the collecting strategies of the Bishopsgate Institute, The Feminist Library and grassroots collections within institutions.
Round-table two: The Politics of Opening up Access
This roundtable will think about digital, collaborative and interventional strategies of groups using archives, with contributions from Lauren Craig of X Marks the Spot, Barby Asante, the Women’s Art Library and Mayday Rooms.
Friday 4th March 2022 | 16:00 – 18:00 | Birkbeck, University of London
In person, with an option to move online. If held in person, numbers will be very limited. A waiting list will operate, and will be used to invite participants if it goes online.
Image description: Research display at the Jo Spence Memorial Library, 2020. Photo taken by Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe
We are pleased to share the details and open bookings for our third workshop entitled Archivable. Led by Beth Bramich and Hatty Nestor, this session aims to introduce PhD researchers to a range of creative approaches to working with materials held in the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive. There will be a short presentation by archivist Charlene Heath, who oversees the Jo Spence archive at the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) in Toronto, Canada.
This workshop asks: How can we creatively engage with materials that may fall outside of standard definitions of what can be catalogued as an archive? To explore this question, material from the Jo Spence Memorial Archive will be used as a case study. This Archive is made up of material both from and about the life of British writer, educator, photographer and ‘cultural sniper’ Jo Spence (1934-92), compiled and then generously donated to the History and Theory of Photography Centre at Birkbeck University by her former collaborator, Terry Dennett. The Birkbeck collection holds most of the Jo Spence material in London, while the largest repository of Spence’s memorial archive was donated by Terry Dennett to the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) in Toronto, Canada.
The workshop will be divided into two one-hour sessions. In the first hour we will be working directly with archive material within the collection to create associative routes through the archives, making intuitive connections between photocopies, print outs, personal notes, collected magazines and pamphlets. Through this exploration, participants will create their own catalogue entries and maps of the archive to demonstrate alternative modes of relating to, and displaying the material, with a particular focus on situating items that might fall outside of traditional archiving practices.
The second hour will take the form of a reading group, discussing a translation of a text by Charlene Heath ‘L’image militante et son institutionnalisation. La Jo Spence Memorial Archive’ (2020) that explores the radical nature of Jo Spence’s practice and in particular how the over one-hundred high-quality colour photocopies, consumer-level digital printouts, and digital files now held in the collection at the RIC function as extensions of Spence and Dennett’s political project, which prioritized dissemination and the rhetoric of their photographic messages over and above all else. Please note that the text will be sent to registered participants in advance of the session.
This workshop is open to all, although aimed in particular at PhD researchers who are working creatively and politically with archival material. Spaces are limited, please register via Eventbrite. We encourage participants to take a lateral flow test before attending and to observe guidelines on face covering and social distancing.
Further information:
Animating Archives is a project between the Women’s Art Library and the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive at Birkbeck University, which keeps materials belonging to Dennett and Spence as well as a collection of books relating to Spence and a section of Dennett’s personal library.
Charlene Heath is Archives Assistant at the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) in Toronto, Canada and a doctoral candidate in the joint program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson/York University in Toronto. She holds a BFA in Photography from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and a MA in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University in collaboration with the Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, USA. She has written reviews and articles for BlackFlash Magazine, Photography & Culture, Aperture Blog, Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review (RACER) (forthcoming), and Transbordeur photographie (forthcoming). Through an analysis of the now dispersed Jo Spence Memorial Archive, her forthcoming dissertation considers the enduring legacy of political photographic practice in Britain in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Reading Group Text:
Charlene Heath, ‘L’image militante et son institutionnalisation. La Jo Spence Memorial Archive’, Transbordeur. Photographie histoire société, no. 4, 2020, pp. 104-117. [English translation]
This workshop is generously funded by CHASE Doctoral Partnership.
Saturday 25th June 2022 | 14:00-16:00 | 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, 198 Railton Road, SE24 0JT
Presentation online and in-person / workshop in-person only
Access Information: Presentation (and workshop tbc) will be live-captioned. There will be a 10 minute break halfway through the event.
In person, with an option to access presentation online. In-person workshop numbers will be limited and booking is essential.
We are pleased to share the details and open bookings for our fourth workshop entitled Creative Captioning in the Archive. This session aims to introduce PhD researchers and others to a range of creative approaches to captioning, exploring what this can bring to working with art and activist archives, with guidance from The Art of Captioning research group co-leads Hannah Wallis and Sarah Hayden.
The Art of Captioning is a British Art Network research group that brings together artists, curators, researchers, activists and access workers to address the state of captioning and access awareness in British Art. Hannah Wallis and Sarah Hayden will begin the workshop by delivering a presentation about The Art of Captioning’s ongoing work on access as ethos, which will be available for participants to join remotely as well as in-person at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning. This will then be followed by an in-person practical workshop on access-thinking in archives, with the opportunity for participants to work directly with materials held in collection of the Women’s Art Library and 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning.
This workshop is open to all, although aimed in particular at PhD researchers who are working creatively and politically with archival material. Spaces are limited, please register via Eventbrite. We encourage participants to take a lateral flow test before attending and to observe guidelines on face covering and social distancing. Any questions can be sent to Beth Bramich (bbram001@gold.ac.uk) or Hatty Nestor (knesto01@mail.bbk.ac.uk).