bbram001 – Animating Archives

Holly Antrum: Markéta’s Notes

Artist and filmmaker Holly Antrum reflects on her recent artwork Markéta’s Notes, which featured in the exhibition ‘Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Intersections in Theory, Film and Art’, curated by Oliver Fuke and Nicolas Helm-Grovas at Camera Austria in Graz. She has been working in a TECHNE-AHRC funded collaborative partnership between Kingston School of Art and the British Film Institute for her practice-based PhD.

An audio version of this blog post can be listened to here:

On a table, yellow, white and light green papers with handwritten notes are spread out, overlapping so the ones underneath can just be seen. — Holly Antrum, Markéta’s Notes, 2019–22. Photo courtesy the artist

As a collection of papers, Markéta’s Notes is an artwork encountered on a display table, but which can also be handled as a folder and read up close or taken away from the exhibition. It can be read selectively in relation to the surrounding curation or read by itself and may eventually guide the reader back to the BFI National Archive. Visitors in Graz won’t know much about Markéta, but it is apparent that the notes are a reproduction of a set of copies produced from viewing Peter Wollen’s handwritten originals at the BFI Special Collections viewing desk in London. As a contribution to the exhibition that includes well known works by Laura Mulvey and Wollen, as well as intersecting artworks by other artists, Markéta’s Notes can function in two ways. The first is the most basic, that they highlight and widen access to Wollen’s archived notebooks through having been copied from them (the anachronism of longhand evading the copyright of the scanner or lens as an adaptation of the original – though duly approved by the donor of the Wollen collection). The second being that Markéta’s Notes operate at the level of an autonomous artwork that problematises the manifestation of what we see: that this is all situated inside a fiction, or conveyed by the hand of not me, but a fictional name, who has translated that encounter physically onto a new page – and then left the archive with the copy. Inside the stationer’s mint-green folder, Markéta’s voice is presented broadly stating her process, time and place, observations about material edges, expectations about handling the six copied documents inside, as well as alluding to something utopian, and detached from the practical aspects of navigating large collections. She says: ‘My dream for a state film archive which is open to any level of film knowledge […] An archive networked on sentience ahead of the authorial, with the same attention to materials that archivists imbue, would […] transgress its mainstream and alternative histories and their infinitude of gaps’.

Markéta’s Notes (2019-22), are part of an ongoing artist filmmaking and writing project that explores the formation of a fictional narrator, a researcher, and invests an interest in an idea of the self, a reader, in her subjective movement across archival material and in place of the formal structures that govern the archive. As a long-term project, the practice absorbs a contemporary and real set of limitations (the restrictions of the pandemic, the rules and contingent permits of the archive and a fluctuating pattern of being up close in the archive or in an interview to being entirely removed from the subjects themselves). The practicalities that inform the project also include shadowing an archivist and asking questions, prioritising those crucial interpersonal means of looking into an archive. It also requires holding onto reflections about the state of mind attached to archival research – for example we might be interested in more than one thing and in disconnected things simultaneously. In a sense, drawing on observations of the layers of archival encounters is an attempt to side-step canonical knowledge (and even subject-vocabulary, both of which we are perhaps supposed/assumed to already hold when we enter the archive). The publication Markéta’s Notes offers an entry point and set of signposts that begin to reflect the passage of Markéta’s attention through her research, and her later voice upon it. Her voice is also an interpersonal construction – researched in another corner of my project through oral history interviews with a small group of Czech women born in the mid–late 1970s, with a personal interest to develop the subjectivity of a daughter of my mother by a different turn of history and thereby potential history. In a fictive, reality-rooted space, Markéta’s Notes layers and traverses multiple narratives and is propelled foremost by the human and interpersonal labour of archives and memory-keeping.

A small bright yellow booklet is held open on a double page spread, both sides filled with handwritten notes. — Holly Antrum, Marketa’s Notes, 2022. Photo courtesy the artist

At the beginning of the project, the conversations I had with the BFI Wollen archivist, Wendy Russell, highlighted Wollen’s recent presence in the collection. Their status and attached tasks I found interesting. The Wollen collection was then (and still is) uniquely and powerfully indeterminate within the superstructure it is becoming housed in for perpetuity. I feel that this changes once accessions are settled into the overall index. The status of ‘being catalogued’ within the BFI enabled a timely viewpoint to rethink my interactions with the search interface of the BFI, observing that it dictated much of how and what we can reach towards, drawing on a profile of what one might already know. The Wollen collection thereby eluded the search interface and categorised identity. It signified materials that one might spend time with alone, but on other days are being condition checked, that are changing in hierarchy and ID number, and may be in a different place (or even site) next time one visits – this transition status of ‘becoming’ seemed to invite a response. To respond with developing a fictional consciousness amid working within the ‘Scripts Documents and Ephemera’ section of the BFI National Archive also offers a way to engage through practice with the narrations appearing on paper from Wollen’s own films and in his scriptwriting – also centring the archived object and its present context.

Drawing on the arguably encyclopaedic aggregation of film and cultural references existing within Wollen’s notes, I have sought to create a sample in Markéta’s Notes, to invest these notebooks with the speculative utility of an alternative collection catalogue – albeit a loose and haptic idea of a system of reference within a journey of research. The project is rooted in recent precedents such as the mythopoetic adaptations of reality that David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan’s term ‘fictioning’ invites of contemporary art practice, and commissioned projects such as the 37 curatorial and artistic experiments that made up the Arsenal’s Living Archive Project centred on the 50 years of that film archive in Berlin in 2013. It also bears in mind the influence that theoretical, reparative worldmaking projects such as Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s Potential History could have on fictioning notes were it to evolve into a template available to a range of different subjectivities through a decolonial research collective working out these different routes, and embarking on the ‘unlearning’ that could be activated through a national collection.

On a table, yellow, white and light green paper booklets with handwritten notes are spread out, overlapping so the ones underneath can just be seen. — Holly Antrum, Markéta’s Notes, 2019–22. Photo courtesy the artist

Coming back to the project as an artist’s multiple, historians of Peter Wollen can only use Markéta’s Notes to act as a mediated prompt which observes the lost ‘purity’ of something live within the archival encounter for oneself. Instead, a sample is shared from a previous encounter, with facsimiles that are ambulant and inexact. They instead encounter the facsimile, the intensity of Markéta’s study amplifying the time held within the personal tool of the notebook. There is an encompassing engagement with the schemata of notebook pages to reflect a material form of liveness (and perhaps obsessiveness) condensed in the archive. The schemata of Wollen’s notes occurs most clearly within one kind of note-form selected for the reproductions – that of film viewing notes (reproduced on yellow paper as a nod to Wollen’s use of yellow legal notepads, as was also typical of some film reviewers in the pre-internet era). And there, with a cue to a selection from a wider quantity of such notes, we see some of what was momentarily important to Wollen as he watched the films (here, Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex in full and a sample section of British kitchen sink dialogues from Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey). His captions on the films are vivid and express the brevity of notetaking and the passage of dialogue from screen to page. Parts of the notes are illegible, but every available mark has been copied, just without copying the original handwriting. The interference of Markéta might be forgiven, as she allows this information, or these narratives, to travel out from the archive, an almost adolescent subversion of the rules. In the gallery these yellow notes are presented as a pile of free concertina leaflets suggesting the opportunity to watch the films ourselves and compare our impressions with his, while other contents of Markéta’s Notes are distinguished for different modes of reading and sit below a glass tabletop – although readers may note the folder says ‘Please do not attempt to keep my copies in such strict ways’ – as well as the historical permutations of Benjamin’s foundational text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction for the media invoked there and mirrored here, including the stranding of the camera.

On a glass topped vitrine white, light yellow and light green papers are laid out. Stacks of bright yellow paper booklets sit on top of the glass. — Holly Antrum, Markéta’s Notes, 2019–22. Photo courtesy the artist

Turning to real-time marks rather than using a lens, Markéta has the desire to use Wollen’s notebooks (because, she says, of his proximity to feminism during his life, though paper-habits and a material attraction of one notebook user to another might also be observed in the work). From Wollen’s lists, references, drafts, conference notes and screenplays, the researcher is poised to depart into other parts of the archive – a Borgesian fiction of excess which would be impossible to complete but which Markéta very loosely and humbly attempts through diagrams and new lists, standing back to see what is emerging. A filmography derived from looking through the files of Wollen’s film notes appears in Markéta’s Notes on the inside cover.

I am still working out why Markéta is interested in Wollen and allow for a misalignment of histories as well as the scope for misreadings that do occur, quite literally, where handwriting is concerned. What may be most useful to think about in publishing Markéta’s Notes is how feminist projects (be that in subject, methodology or both), here including fictioning, might decontextualise their use of archival materials to reorient ourselves within the patriarchal history project of the archive. By a provocation drawing on and linking three areas of learning and critique: subject, reader and architecture, these happen to reflect some of the productive impositions that artist research can entertain and juxtapose.

In the foreground of a gallery space is a glass vitrine table with papers spread out inside and stacked on top. Nearby on the wall is a series of small, framed photos and further back in the room is a square television monitor. — Holly Antrum, Markéta’s Notes, 2019–22. Photo courtesy the artist

Embedded to a certain degree within the institution, this project will always struggle to fulfil some of its more playful or radical interests. But, by virtue of the for the exhibition at , the selected hard-copy notes allow for Markéta’s utopian proposal to enter the space for ideas that is invited by the gallery. Being an embodied part of the wider project, of course, Markéta’s Notes can go back into its originating archive and have full circularity (but also become neutralised by this home position). They will also go on to others, including the archive at Camera Austria, and the Living Archive library at the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin, which Markéta mentions visiting in the folder statement. As a project with an exterior (publishing through archive) and an interior (oral history and a private process of writing and filmmaking), this demonstrates how an art practice can posit different branches of research nested across and permeating one another, scratching out a kind of algorithm in which correspondences emerge, without obligation to synthesis but an attention to the directions taken through emergence, schemata and subjective process.

Reference list

Publications

Holly Antrum, Markéta’s Notes, edition of 400 (Graz, Austria: Camera Austria, 2022).

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London, England: Verso, 2019).

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935) in Walter Benjamin, Ed. Hannah Arendt, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).

David Burrows & Simon O’Sullivan, Fictioning: the myth-functions of contemporary art and philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

Ed. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Living Archive – Archival Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice (Berlin: Arsenal Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V., 2013).

Films

Oedipus Rex, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1967; Italy: Euro International Films). Available to view for free (Italian language only) on YouTube.

A Taste of Honey, directed by Tony Richards (1961; England: Bryanston Films). Available to view for free on BFI Player and in BFI Mediatheque, London Southbank.

Exhibition

‘Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Intersections in Theory, Film and Art’, curated by Oliver Fuke and Nicolas Helm-Grovas, Camera Austria, Graz, 11 June–14 August 2022.

Animating Archives Workshop 4: Creative Captioning in the Archive

This workshop, organised by Beth Bramich and Hatty Nestor and led by the two co-founders of The Art of Captioning, Hannah Wallis and Sarah Hayden, aimed 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.

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. This workshop began with a presentation about The Art of Captioning’s ongoing work on access as ethos, which was available for participants to join remotely as well as in-person at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, Brixton. Below is a recording of Hannah and Sarah’s presentation introduced by Catherine Grant and live-captioned in the gallery by Kate, a stenographer who works for the company 121 Captions.

This presentation was followed by an in-person workshop at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, during which Sarah and Hannah led the participants in a series of activities looking at material from the Women’s Art Library collections, including a selection of ephemera from artists’ projects, audio tapes of interviews and talks, an artist’s film on DVD, and posters advertising various events and activities.

Recommended Resources

Hannah and Sarah compiled a few resources that they recommend for approaching accessibility.

Perkins Learning has produced a short clear guide to writing alt-text and image descriptions. This is endorsed by Rooted in Rights, a disability rights programme based in Washington State, USA.

A more expansive, but still eminently teachable approach is offered by Alt-Text as Poetry a collaboration between Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan, supported by Eyebeam and the Disability Visibility Project.

Further reading suggestions include Carolyn Lazard’s Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice and Rooted in Rights’ Accessibility Resources.

To learn more about The Art of Captioning please see their research group page on the British Art Network website.

FURTHER INFORMATION:

The Art of Captioning is a research group co-led by Hannah Wallis (Artist and Curator; Assistant Curator, Wysing Arts Centre) and Sarah Hayden (Associate Professor in Literature and Culture, University of Southampton, AHRC Innovation Fellow: Voices in the Gallery) that explores what creative captioning can bring to art while advancing vital work around access, equality and inclusivity in the sector. The aim of the research group is to bring together artists, curators, researchers, activists and access workers to address the state of captioning and access awareness in British Art, and builds on Wallis and Hayden’s previous programme, Caption-Conscious Ecology, at Nottingham Contemporary in 2021.

198 Contemporary Arts and Learning is a centre for visual arts, education and creative enterprise. Their work is framed by their local communities and the history of the Brixton uprisings; informed by a policy context that calls for greater action on equality, and shaped by unfulfilled demand for diverse visual arts and new pathways to creative careers.

The Women’s Art Library began as the Women Artists Slide Library, an artists’ initiative that developed into an arts organization publishing catalogues and books as well as a magazine from early 1983 to 2002. WAL collected slides, ephemera and other art documentation from artists and actively documented exhibitions and historical collections to offer a public space to view and experience women’s art. As part of Goldsmiths Library Special Collections and Archives, the Women’s Art Library continues to collect, with thousands of artists from around the world are represented in some form in this collection.

This workshop was generously funded by CHASE Doctoral Partnership.

Animating Archives Workshop 3: ARCHIVABLE at the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive

Led by Beth Bramich and Hatty Nestor, this session aimed to introduce PhD researchers to a range of creative and political approaches to working with materials held in the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive at Birkbeck, University of London, and included a presentation by archivist Charlene Heath, who oversees the Jo Spence Memorial Archive at the Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) in Toronto, Canada.

At Birkbeck University, Patrizia Di Bello, Professor of History and Theory of Photography, works alongside students and colleagues inside and out of the University to look after the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive. The 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 by her former collaborator, Terry Dennett. This collection represents most of the Jo Spence material in London, while the largest repository of Spence’s memorial archive was donated by Dennett to the RIC.

Charlene Heath’s presentation introduced the workshop participants to her work at the RIC, with particular attention to the process by which Spence and Dennett’s materials have been catalogued and organised. She expanded on her text ‘L’image militante et son institutionnalisation. La Jo Spence Memorial Archive’ (2020) (an English translation of which was circulated to participants ahead of time), which explores how the over one-hundred high-quality colour photocopies, consumer-level digital printouts, and digital files now held at the RIC function as extensions of Spence and Dennett’s radical political project, reflecting how they prioritized dissemination and the rhetoric of their photographic messages over and above all else.

Patrizia shared with the group the unconventional history of how the materials that make up the Jo Spence Memorial Library came to find a home at Birkbeck, personally reviewing and collecting materials from a residence in London that Spence had shared with Dennett and transporting crates by taxi to the university building.

Across a large table an archive box has been opened and the photographs, postcards and other printed matter it contained have been laid out and roughly organised. — Materials from the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive sorted and ordered by workshop participants. Photograph: Silvia Bombardini

Drawing on Charlene and Patrizia’s introductions to the complexities of archiving materials relating to the life and work of a cultural and political activist and artist like Jo Spence, the workshop took as its starting point the question: How can we creatively engage with materials that may fall outside of standard definitions of what can be catalogued as an archive?

Working directly with archive boxes selected from the Memorial Library Archive, participants were encouraged to work in groups to create associative routes through the large quantities of photocopies, print-outs, personal notes, collected magazines and pamphlets held in the collection. With a particular focus on situating items that might fall outside of traditional archiving practices, the groups worked together to discuss and organise the contents of boxes containing in one instance hundreds of loosely grouped photographs and postcards and in another a selection of photographers’ props such as costume jewellery and Barbie dolls.

It was so inspiring to be able to see—and touch!—objects from the archive. The session was very social, well structured, with good guidance on how to navigate the archives with care but also creativity. It gave us the chance to explore the content of the box and spend time with different kinds of objects.

– Floriane Misslin, workshop participant

Two people's hands move photographs on a table on which many different colour and black and white photographs have been laid out. — Workshop participants view and sort photographs from the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive. Photograph: Floriane Misslin

To end the workshop session, the participants were invited to share insights and reflections they had gained while working in groups to sift and sort through the archive boxes. The discussion focused on the different ways they had personally related to the materials and the common themes that developed as they worked together to try to locate the items in terms of Spence’s personal life and practice, wider political and social histories, and to identify what might be considered “authored works” amongst collected ephemera and reference material for Spence and Dennett. Through these conversations emerged ideas for future public displays and dissemination of the archive, including methods to animate Spence’s elusion of neat categorisation or assimilation by the mainstream, and make apparent her multiple and interconnected roles as a writer, educator, photographer and ‘cultural sniper’.

References

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]

For more information about the Jo Spence Memorial Archive at the Ryerson Image Centre, please visit the dedicated Jo Spence Memorial Archive collection page.

For more information about the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive visit the Library Archive page. To arrange access or if you are interested in volunteering to assist in collating materials, please email p.dibello (@bbk.ac.uk).

This workshop was generously funded by CHASE Doctoral Partnership.

Animating Archives Workshop 4: Creative Captioning in the Archive

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.

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.

This event will take place in person, with an option to access presentation online. In-person workshop numbers will be limited and booking is essential. Please register via Eventbrite.

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 or Hatty Nestor.

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.

Image description: Research display at the Jo Spence Memorial Library, 2020. Photo taken by Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe

This workshop is generously funded by CHASE Doctoral Partnership.

Hannah Kemp-Welch: Voice, Glitch Feminism and community engagement with archives

Glitch Feminism proposes that an error in a social system is a moment for revisioning and change. ‘This glitch is a correction to the “machine”, and, in turn, a positive departure.’ (Russell, 2012). Transposing this idea to archives: if the social system is the institution and the glitch is its forced closure during the pandemic, how can we use this moment to reassess our work? Libraries and archives often attract audiences with high levels of cultural capital; the ‘glitch’ in normal operations invites us to consider who is not present and how this can be addressed. As the Women’s Art Library was not able to invite guests in, the question of how to take the experience out was timely.

In late 2020, the Women’s Art Library (WAL) awarded me the Art in the Archive Bursary. My artistic practice is focused on listening, considering sound as a way of knowing. Though archives are predictably quiet spaces, I could imagine voices speaking from within the boxes. As a first-timer at WAL, I was keen to work with others to explore the materials together and to learn more about the archive through the diversity of our hearings. I wrote to community organisations operating within 10 miles of the WAL – organisations supporting elders, carers, migrants, families, young people and other groups. I asked how their members are able to engage with projects during lockdown, noting different access needs. There was no single way that worked for everyone, so flexibility was crucial for the project. Community organisations sent my invitation to explore the WAL out to their members; nine women got in touch.

As access to the library was limited during lockdown, the WAL curator Althea Greenan provided me with scans of archive materials, which I supplemented with related images and texts I found online. I organised these materials into (initially digital) packs, each relating to the work of one artist whose work is held in the collection. The materials included press releases, invitations to private views, newspaper clippings and photographs of the artist and their work. I was keen for each pack to have some common materials, including a photograph of the artist and their biography. I also selected images of their work and contextual writing about it. This was hard to find in some cases – the Women’s Art Library was founded in the early 1980s in response to the lack of documentation of the work of women artists, before our lives were archived on the internet.

Three box files of pamphlets — Archive of Women’s Artist Slide Library Journals at the Women’s Art Library

I wondered about my search for materials that provide ‘context’ in relation to the archive. Would it be OK to send a local resident a picture of an artwork from the archive on its own? Perhaps this would create an openness, freedom for the participant to have their own experience without sifting through layers of existing interpretations and ascribed meanings. On the other hand, would this appear obtuse; would it lack an entry point or frame through which to formulate a response? Digging deeper, the photograph of the artwork is not the artwork. How does the experience change when looking at representations of art, rather than the art itself? What is the experience of looking at archived ephemera from exhibitions, when the exhibitions are over and the artworks are elsewhere?

Ten packs of materials, each relating to one artist, resulted from my work with Althea. I printed these and sent a pack to each community participant via post or email, with an invitation to meet me online, on the phone, or on a park bench to explore it together. My first trip was to the Co-oPepys Community Arts Project in Deptford. There I met Luciana, Limor and Mila, all artists, who worked under the collaborative ‘We Women’ banner. We spoke about some of the artists in the packs. I asked them if they connected to the artists’ works, and if they had a favourite. I was struck by how freely they connected their personal experiences to the subject matter of the artworks. Personal stories were shared and recorded. Their responses were generous and they engaged deeply with the ideas present in the archive materials – they agreed that talking about what we could see helped to build meaning. I had a similar experience meeting Lucy and Laura on a park bench in Peckham, they intuitively linked their personal histories with their chosen artworks. Beatriz recorded her responses on voice notes and emailed them to me. She explored several artists’ packs before selecting an artist she shared cultural heritage with and spoke about her feelings of crossing multiple cultures. Finally, I arranged two sessions with members of Meet Me, a social and creative programme for over 60s in Lewisham. Rosaline, Moira and Dahlia have minimal access to digital technologies, so we arranged a group phone call linking up landlines to speak together. Conversations were lively and Dahlia’s laughter was a bright spot of the project.

Armchair and microphone in artists' studio space — Studio space at Co-op Pepys Community Arts Project.

The simple act of arranging conversations between people new to the archive opened a space for connection that deepened curiosity about the archive. We took on the voices we thought we heard in the archive as we exchanged our interpretations of the materials. These recorded encounters were endlessly rich. Seven hours of women’s voices responding to documentation of women’s artworks. To extend the invitation to new sections of the community, I edited the collected recordings together and submitted this as sound work Voicing the Archive for broadcast on local London community radio station Resonance FM. I hope the warmth of the voices within will act as a calling card, a heartfelt welcome to the archive.

Several colourful zine covers laid out on a wooden table. — Zines produced by Hannah Kemp-Welch as part of the project at the Women’s Art Library.

The spirit of community, creativity and conviviality that comes from collective working really came across. This was what felt missing from our institutions as doors were shut during the pandemic, but also this is what feels increasingly rare and squeezed out as austerity cuts public engagement programmes. Only one of these nine women living within ten miles of the Women’s Art Library had visited the archive before. Given that funding for outreach projects is unlikely to increase in the current political climate, what are our options to share the resources we have outwards? In this collaboration with the Women’s Art Library, I prioritised hyperlocal connections and the production of creative takeaways for communities near to the WAL. As the project ended, I produced a series of simple zines providing an introduction to the WAL and an artist represented within. These zines will be posted to community organisations operating locally, and I hope that these small snippets of the archive end up in jacket pockets across the borough.

Hannah Kemp-Welch was recipient of the Art in the Archive Bursary 2020, funded by the Women’s Art Library and Feminist Review. Hannah is a sound artist with a socially-engaged practice. She produces audio works with community groups for installation and broadcast, using voices, field recordings and found sounds.

To visit the Women’s Art Library and access the zines printed as part of this project, please email special.collections (@gold.ac.uk) or phone Special Collections 020 7717 2295 to make an appointment. Visit the Special Collections page for further information about access and related collections or email Althea Greenan a.greenan(@gold.ac.uk) with more detailed queries relating to the Women’s Art Library.

References

Russell, L. (2012) Digital dualism and the glitch feminism manifesto. The Society Pages, 10.

Listen to ‘Voicing the Archive’, an audio artwork by Hannah Kemp-Welch

Hannah Waters: Encountering the Jean Spencer Archives

The afternoon is cold and crisp. I’m a little early, so I take my time as I wander through to the Women’s Art Library, clutching a green slip of paper with my name and the time of my appointment scribbled on it in biro. I’m met by the curator of the Women’s Art Library, Dr Althea Greenan; I introduce myself and the reason for my visit. I am a PhD student, and my practice research project centres around the archives of my great aunt, constructivist artist Jean Spencer. My position is one of multiplicity: researcher, great niece, practitioner, childlike observer. I grew up with Jean’s paintings and relief works displayed around me in my family home, but without the artist herself: I was only a young child when Jean passed away in 1998. My interest now is in encountering her archives, the traces she left behind, and the pull I feel to activate her work in the present moment. I want to understand the principles of her work through physical engagement with them as part of a movement practice, using my body to explore the rules and systems that guided her: geometry, repetition, shape, line, mathematical sequence. My practice aims to embody these principles whilst also exploring my relationship to Jean herself: the memories that arise, the associations that emerge. It is a process of accessing the insights that are held in the archive, activating them, and sharing my experience of them through a mode of performance.

Two square canvases painted with colourful triangles — Jean’s paintings in the family home. Photos by Hannah Waters

Althea tells me that she remembers my grandmother bringing Jean’s archival material to her when the Library was situated at Fulham Palace. There is something of that same contraction of time in my presence here, now, ready to encounter her archive over twenty years later. The Jean Spencer folder is laid out for me on the desk, the anticipation building as I open the cover.

I am drawn to the slides first; they hold me for a long time. I recognise my grandmother’s handwriting on the labels, some of the paintings depicted in the tiny frames. Jean’s work is meticulous: geometric, straight lines and angles systematically constructed through precise calculation and colour theory. There is something transient about holding the slides up to the light – the trace of the work, but not the work itself, both there and not there: my experience of Jean. The slides themselves are little windows into rooms where Jean’s work hung.

Sheet of slides showing geometric paintings, handwritten captions on slide frames — Slides of Jean’s work in the Women’s Art Library. Photo by Hannah Waters

The way the light filters through the transparency reminds me of an essay by Jean where she wrote about her paintings having “different, changing effects… made anew in each hanging/space/light (performance) and in each viewing subject (response)” (Spencer, 1994). Her work performs here, too, each painting reanimated in its frame, as responsive to space and light as the full-sized canvases that hang in my family home.

I like the idea that experiencing a painting can be a performance, and that this performance is co-created through painting, viewer, space, and the changing light of the day. The interaction of all these contextual elements blurs the boundaries between energy and inertia. Matter comes alive here, and I recognise this feeling. I have felt this liveliness in my engagement with Jean’s paintings all my life, something drawing me in, persisting.

There are programmes from Jean’s exhibitions in amongst the archive material, shows in 1969, 1974, 1996. As I hold them in my hands, I wonder who has held them before: Jean herself, maybe? I feel a pull towards holding what she held, leafing through the same book, a repeated gesture across the years, across generations. Tightening threads in the fabric of time.

Memories arise as I sift through the material: a proportion is memorial documentation, copies of readings and tributes. I remember my mother telling me that she’d read at the funeral, telling the story of when Jean took her to a Monet exhibition at the Royal Academy. It was packed, but Jean led them around to the end of the gallery, telling them to work backwards against the flow of the crowd. They would experience something unique this way, something different to the masses, moving at their own pace. My mother saw this as a metaphor for how Jean lived her life: going against the grain, against expectation.

There are a couple of photos of Jean, with colleagues, working. My mind wanders to my only real memory of her: a sunny day spent with the family at the Isabella Plantation in Richmond Park, London, the azaleas in full flower, then back to Jean’s for a lunch of dippy eggs and soldiers. I remember the colours: brick red, a deep purple, and the golden egg yolk.

I think about how the physical act of engaging with these archives, touching, sharing space with them, gives rise to these memories, to a mind constantly making associations. I imagine a transfer happening in the interface between materials: my interaction with them as activating, animating, feeding forward. A continuance of creative life.

A figure performing a sequence of ten poses — Practical exploration of Jean’s work. Photo by Hannah Waters

In my research and my practice, I am interested in the activation of archival material, of going beyond the fixed repository of the archive and into a creative process of ‘anarchiving’ (Massumi in Murphie, 2016). To me, anarchiving is a process of animation: activating dormant matter and accessing the knowledge that is held in an archive through physical engagement with it. Touching, holding, allowing memories to arise, moving with and through the materials and their creative potential, taking these ideas into the body and experimenting with them practically. The term ‘anarchive’ speaks to “that which is not contained by archive, that which is without archive, particularly those things that cannot be captured by documents, fragments, and text” (Zaayman, 2014:319). I like this way of understanding the anarchive because it encompasses both presence and absence, and it is the intermingling of the two that characterises my experience of Jean throughout my life: the presence of her work, her archives, the presence of memory, but the absence of Jean herself.

For me, this anarchival impulse is physical, it’s a call to action and interaction, a feeling of being pulled towards something. I am pulled to touch, hold, examine, to think deeply, to try to understand the rules, systems and underlying structures present in Jean’s work. I am pulled to experience this knowledge in my body: I take this impulse into my practice, using movement to think through my experiences with Jean’s archival material. How does this angle, shape, repetition, feel in my body? It is a moment of encounter, and a meeting of bodies – in this case human and archival – the site where dormant matter is animated, spurred forward. It happens in the present, but the pull I feel is also temporal: the sense of the past interweaving with the present, persisting into the future.

I close the folder, but my engagement with Jean’s work lingers on. I turn over ideas in my mind as I leave the Library and walk back towards the station: geometry, duration, relationship. I wonder what I will take into the studio with me: a repeated gesture, a particular shape, that feeling of the unfolding of time. In the fading light, the sky just verges on the promise of deep violet; the colour makes me think of Jean.

Pink and purple sunset over a residential street — Photo taken upon leaving the Women’s Art Library, 06/01/22. Photo by Hannah Waters

Hannah Waters is an artist-researcher and PhD student in Visual and Material Cultures at Northumbria University.

REFERENCES

Massumi, B. (2016) ‘Working Principles’ in Murphie, A. [Ed] The Go-To Book of Anarchiving, Montreal: SenseLab.

Spencer, J. (1994) Looking Long and Hard At, essay accessed via Jean Spencer Archive, London: Chelsea College of Arts.

Zaayman, C. (2014) ‘Anarchive (Picturing Absence)’ in Hamilton, C. and Skotnes, P. [Eds] Uncertain Curature: In and Out of the Archive, Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jacana Media.

Animating Archives Workshop 3: Archivable

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.

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. Please register via Eventbrite.

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.

Further information:

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]

Image description: Research display at the Jo Spence Memorial Library, 2020. Photo taken by Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe

This workshop is generously funded by CHASE Doctoral Partnership.

Call for Blog Proposals

The Animating Archives blog has been active since September 2020, with a range of posts from academics, artists and archivists. The Animating Archives project connects academics, artists, researchers and activists working creatively and politically with archives, including but not limited to the Women’s Art Library and the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive.

We’re now calling for proposals for 2022: we are looking for submissions of text and images by anyone working on ‘animating’ archives through their research. The submissions are restricted by the format of the blog, so we encourage shorter length (max 1000 word) pieces but are open to discussing longer essays. We are also keen to provide space for sharing resources, which could include expanded reading lists, interviews and reviews. Image based submissions are also welcome, as long as you have permission to reproduce the material. We can also host links to video works.

We are able to offer a fee of £150 for each blog selected for publication and welcome existing work and work in progress for consideration. If you’re interested in participating, please email a 250 word proposal for a blog post by Friday 28 January.

To submit a proposal please contact:

Beth Bramich bbram001@gold.ac.uk

Hatty Nestor knesto01@mail.bbk.ac.uk

Reference list

Recommended Resources

FURTHER INFORMATION:

References

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.

Further information:

References

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.

Further information:

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.