Animating Archives Workshop 2: “You’ve been talking about access today”

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

We are pleased to announce the details of our second workshop surrounding the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive, to take place via zoom. Please register via Eventbrite. 

March 19th 2021 | 16:00- 18:30

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 the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto, 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are encouraged to discuss their own research on these topics as well concerns around the ethics of re-performance of historical documents, identity, art as activism and any other issues that arise from the minutes and our group’s handling of them.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

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.”

A black and white photocopy of

Feminist Group-work: The Women Artists Slide Library as social and psychic community

‘Groups,’ a list of established feminist art groups, published in MAMA, 1978

My research uses the Women’s Art Library to look at the mobilisation of collectives, co-operatives and collaboration in feminist art in the UK. It explores the various iterations of group work and organising methods used through the Women’s Liberation Movement and how they manifested in feminist art practice throughout the seventies and eighties. The Women’s Art Library, itself a collaborative effort, also produces a psychically collective space in the archive that creates linkages with artists across temporal and geographical constraints, collapsing chronologies and topologies. 

So far in my project, I have traced the beginnings of the Women Artist’s Slide Library to multiple groups and co-operative run spaces in London in the 1970s. The groups, such as those listed in MAMA, some informal gatherings of friends, some formal co-operatives that shared resources and spaces, all lay the ground work for the collective formation of the slide registry. The collection was also crowd sourced, taking submissions and relying memberships from artists to constitute the collection and sustain the operation of the slide library. 

There are multiple collaborative methods at play here, that both align with and contradict the collective practices of the Women’s Liberation Movement. The foundation of which was small groups which were talking based (consciousness-raising) and/or organisation based (action groups). The slide library sought to raise consciousness about women’s art, women’s art history and the contemporary conditions women artists were practicing in. The actions to combat the problems they found in these areas through exhibition making and creating networks of women artists, curators, teachers and art historians.

A large component of my research is considering the ways in which these organising structures, learnt from the Women’s Liberation Movement, shaped the ways women artists worked. There are many examples of art co-operatives, collective run gallery and exhibition spaces and collaborative art works and exhibitions that evidence this. What I am interested in here are the deviations from the traditional modes of feminist organising to account for new activities that were important to artists. 

Study groups, which included slide shows, conversations about women artists in history, discussing each others work, as well as action groups to organise exhibitions, publications and lobby art institutions, were loose ways to organise the intense activities of the feminist art movement. These are a type of organising that facilitated an intense period of cultural production that was public facing, culturally significant, and one that was conscious of producing a history. The slide library is an example of both the study and action group—a place to gather knowledge and produce a history of women’s creative practice in the UK, and to provide a resource on which future histories and practices could be built.

Lily Evans-Hill

Archives Under Lockdown, a workshop at the Women’s Art Library

For the first Animating Archives workshop, Dr Althea Greenan, curator of the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, University of London, gave a tour through her own doctoral research on the slide collection, as well as the many creative responses to the archive by artists, contextualised with a history of the Women’s Art Library as it grew from home-based collection, through to a membership organisation, and finally to a university archive. The recording of Althea’s presentation can be found here:

 

Shadow Archives: a series of reflections and digital objects by the workshop participants

Workshop participants then shared their digital objects, which they had been invited to bring along. We didn’t record the discussion that took place as part of this workshop, but instead circulated an invitation to workshop participants to contribute their thoughts in this collective written post.

The discussion following Althea’s presentation opened up the topic of “Animating Archives” beyond what the organisers had imagined. Starting what might be seen as ‘authorised’ ways of bringing an archive to life – either by writing or various forms of art practice – the discussion moved to think about the digital production and circulation of archival material that then in turn might be thought as constituting a kind of shadow archive.

This was imagined in two ways: first thinking about the circulation of digital material as bootleg items, illegal copies, and, as Holly Isard put it, a version of Hito Steyerl’s famous idea of the ‘poor image’. This digital flow was one way of imagining ‘animating archives’, and which creating forms of unregulated knowledge. The second way of thinking about these digital reproductions was as our practice as researchers: taking multiple photographs and scans, making audio recordings as well as written notes, a mass of data that might get lost on our hard drives as the rush to gather materials in the archive is seldom matched by a cataloguing of digital material in our own personal research files. Althea said that this mass of digital material might be thought of as the ‘sub-conscious’ of our research, a site which is not designed to be rationally catalogued but performs some more opaque function as we orient our projects.

The sense of time-poverty that many of us face when thinking about the nearly always unequal relation between research time and amount of archival material to review is perhaps going to exacerbated when we can return to the archives after lockdown. But in the meantime, here are some reflections and digital objects from the workshop discussion:

Holly Isard

 

My digital object is a screenshot: a low-resolution version of Elizabeth Price’s 2013 video-work A RESTORATION uploaded onto YouTube by ‘disinformator’ and titled Elizabeth Price (1). I had been to visit the ‘real’ version of Price’s work in the Western Art Print Room at the Ashmolean Museum in the summer of 2018. Here, A RESTORATION is held on a memory stick kept in a small plastic box and stored in a ‘secret location’ in the archive. I am only the second person to have visited it (in high resolution, equipped with noise-cancelling headphones) since the print room acquired it in 2016.

In contrast, ‘disinformator’ has racked up 1,981 views. Elizabeth Price (1) conforms to what Hito Steyerl terms a poor image: ‘clandestine cell-phone videos smuggled out of museums and broadcast on YouTube.’ This is the digital version an archive might be inclined to ignore: a copy of a copy, bad resolution, illegally recorded, itinerant and unruly. But, according to Steyerl, these images ‘transform quality into accessibility’ and ‘exhibition value into cult value’, forming an alternative economy of images (Stereyl, 2012). In this way, ‘disinformator’s Elizabeth Price (1) raises the question of ‘value’ for the archivist. This digital objects’ status as illicit grants it exemption from the ‘class society of images’, which in turn allows it a certain kind of radical potential. Value then means something different in relation to the digital version, not aura of the ‘original’, high resolution and exchange value, but perhaps ‘velocity, intensity, spread’ and dematerialisation – as Catherine writes above, creating forms of unregulated knowledge that animate the archive in new, unruly ways.

Beth Bramich

 

The digital object I shared was a scan of a VHS cover (or ‘VHS slick’) for the film On Guard, a feminist heist thriller directed by Susan Lambert and released in 1983. The scan was officially produced and circulated online by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, which I had planned to return to earlier this year to continue research into film and video produced by members of the Sydney Women’s Film Group between 1973 and 1985. My intention had been to divide my time in the ACMI’s collections of the National Film and Sound Archive between watching films and videos I had identified since my last visit and exploring connected archives, including printed matter. Digitisation policies vary between archives, but it is not uncommon for film and video to be accessed through in-house transfers on to blank DVDs and VHS and therefore removed from their original format and packaging and accompanied by brief and often anonymous synopsis entries — at ACMI these were kindly printed out for me by the collection archivists as a long stream over A4 sheets. I am used to moving image archives separating out ephemeral print, which is not always accessed or even held in the same place if it has been collected. Looking at posters and packaging for distribution, although they may be considered secondary to the film, can be extremely illuminating of the public context of these works. It was through rereading a page of annotated synopses, notes and quick sketches, and struggling without this further context, that I began a range of Internet searches for On Guard, attempting to jog the connecting memories of my research ‘sub-conscious’ and answer questions that had arisen since my visit about exhibition and reception.

Through the Animating Archives workshop, I started to think about the ways in which questions form in this time in between — the possibility for connection and creativity that comes from moving through different types of content and their physical locations and digital circulations, like how film stills can reanimate memories of film sequences, or in the absence of the physical archives how several versions of ‘film name + film director + keyword’ searches can make new associations between official and unofficial archives. In this case, I began to sketch out a legacy for On Guard through its digital footprint: a screening at the 2017 edition of the Melbourne International Film Festival, inclusion in a 1986 Channel 4 series ‘In the Pink’ discussed in a personal blog on gay culture in the 1980s, a diversion into the film’s soundtrack with music by Stray Dags reissued this year by Chapter Records, a 2014 Senses of Cinema journal article. This last article’s image credit led me back to ACMI’s collection and the digitised VHS cover, but through this additional exploration I have further developed my shadow archive of the cultural and political context of this film after its release.

Susan Lambert, On Guard, 1983

National Film & Sound Archive, Australian Centre for the Moving Image

https://acmi.net.au/works/78364–on-guard/

Valeria Medici

This was the first time I’ve discussed archiving with people external to my cohort. Understanding and witnessing the role of archived images as they were prior to digital images has given me access to ways to implement physical methodologies into my own artistic practice. The carousel is an object I’m fascinated by, its mechanic and sounds are alien to me, although the images of the individual archived slides somehow retain their physicality and mechanic in a sonic way. After the workshop, I came to realise the importance of sound and of recorded discussions especially after watching the video Althea showed us. That moment is forever incorporated with the objects and images and to me this combination of images and sounds transport meanings and truths in a way nothing else does.

Web: valeriamedici.com

A black and white photocopy of the Women Artist's Slide Library Journal, published 1983

A Brief History of the Women’s Art Library

Photo: The Women Artist’s Slide Library first newsletter, March 1983

The Women Artists Slide Library was founded in the late 1970s by a group of women artists living and working in London. The group, loosely named the Women Artists Slide Collective, envisaged a slide library as a collection that would cultivate a narrative for women’s art and establish a registry for contemporary artists, curators and teachers.

The idea for a slide library ran through the feminist art movement. In 1970, the Ad-Hoc Committee of Women Artists established the Women’s Art Registry, a slide collection which was housed in cooperative galleries including Artists In Residence (A.I.R. Gallery) in New York. Lucy Lippard, then a member of the group,  bought this to the United Kingdom to showcase the array of feminist art practice happening in North America and beyond.

The slide library set up by the Women Artists’ Slide Collective created a picture of the emerging feminist art movement and connected women artists across the United Kingdom. The slide library was advertised across art spaces and publications such as Feminist Art Newsletter (FAN) and Spare Rib. Amongst its first homes was the Women’s Research and Resource centre (now the Feminist Library) and the Womens Art Alliance, a community and education centre in West London.

The library moved to permanent premises at the Battersea Arts Centre in 1982, where it received funding and could use the centre’s facilities to host exhibitions, events and conferences. Along with its move came funding (and subsequently cuts!) from various sources, including public bodies like the Greater London Council and the Arts Council. The collection moved to Fulham Palace in 1983 where it remained until 2000.

In 1985 with Arts Council funding, a paid position for a women of colour was established to trace artists of Black and Asian heritage working within the United Kingdom and North America, as well as those in the Global South. Rita Keegan, an American artist living and working in England, established the Women of Colour Index, a collection of resources, profiles and exhibitions on women artists of colour. This collection has been widely drawn on by collectives since, such as the Women of Colour Index Reading Group and X Marks the Spot.

The Women Artist’s Slide Library Newsletter was started in March 1983 to keep the network of library users and depositors informed of the library’s activities. The newsletter format transformed into the Women Artists Slide Journal in 1987 as it started to include exhibition write ups and book reviews. It then became the Women’s Art Magazine in 1990 and finally MAKE Magazine in 1996, where the publication included articles, essays and artists profiles. The publication chronicles the growing interest in feminist art and the changing landscape of feminist art scholarship.

The library had a brief stint at Central St Martins before being gifted to Goldsmiths in 2003, where it is curated by Dr. Althea Greenan. It remains an active and popular collection for students, researchers and artists, with a busy exhibition and events programme. It is now called the Women’s Art Library to account for its wide collection of books, pamphlets, archival material, artworks and exhibition ephemera that accompany the slides.

Lily Evans-Hill

magazines, newsprint publications and slide files spread across a table with a pair of researcher's glasses.

Workshop 1: Archives during Lockdown

Image description: Selection of magazines, newsletters and slides on the table at the Women’s Art Library during a workshop with Young Barbican Curators. Photo taken by Catarina Rodrigues

For documentation and reflections from this workshop, please check out the blog post and recording here: https://sites.gold.ac.uk/animatingarchives/archives-under-lockdown-a-workshop-at-the-womens-art-library/

We are pleased to share the details and open bookings for our first workshop entitled Archives during Lockdown. It will take place online on the 20th November, 2-4pm. 

Register via Eventbrite here.

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 by 5th November. 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).

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.

Further Resources:

Dahlström, M., Hansson, J., Kjellman, U., 2012. ‘As We May Digitize’ — Institutions and Documents Reconfigured. Liber Q. 21, 455.

“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.

This workshop is generously funded by CHASE Doctoral Partnership.