Animating Archives

The two Animating Archives sessions can be found below, along with their available recordings.

Session 1, Archives during Lockdown, took place on 20th November 2020, and was led by Dr Althea Greenan.

Session 2, You’ve been talking about access today, took place on 19th March 2021, and was led by Terry Dennett.

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November 20th 2020 | 14:00 – 16:00 | Online Animating Archives: Workshop 1, Archives during Lockdown

About this Event

Photo credit: Catarina Rodrigues

Please find the recorded event here:

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.

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

CHASE Terms and Conditions

By registering below you are requesting a place on this training programme or selected sessions that form part of the programme. A member of the CHASE team or the workshop leader will contact you in due course to confirm that a place has been allocated to you. If you are allocated a place but can no longer attend, please cancel your Eventbrite registration or email training@chase.ac.uk so that your place can be reallocated. CHASE training is free to attend and events are often oversubscribed with a waiting list. Failure to notify us of non-attendance in good time means your place cannot be reallocated and repeated failure may mean that your access to future training is limited.

The training is open to:

• CHASE funded and associate students,

• Arts and Humanities PhD students at CHASE member institutions,

• and students and members of staff at CHASE partner institutions

• Arts and Hum PhD students (via the AHRC mailing list)

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March 19th 2021 | 16:00 – 18:30 | Online Animating Archives Workshop 2: You’ve been talking about access today

About this Event

Minutes from Cambridge House Literary Scheme meeting, November 1976, found in the Jo Spence Memorial Archive, Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto.

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 Archive at Ryerson Image Centre, 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 1976. 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.

The source material used for this workshop is from Ryerson Image Centre who keep the majority of the Jo Spence Memorial Archive collection. Animating Archives is a project between the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths University 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.

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.”