Workshops – Animating Archives

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.

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.

Challenging Archives Summer Symposium

Our summer symposium bought together artists, curators, researchers and archivists to explore questions of collecting, access, accountability and platforming in archival collections. The first panel outlines the strategies of archiving within, alongside and in spite of institutions, while the second explores radical interventions and gestures that seek to form relationships, futures, knowledges and practices with the archive.

With many thanks to the panellists and contributors!

Round-table one: The Politics of Preserving (start-1:27:20)

This round table thinks about the collecting strategies of archives and grassroots collections within institutions. The panellists are Shaheen Merali from the Panchayat Special Collection at the Tate Library, Stefan Dickers from the Bishopsgate Institute and Holly Argent from the Women Artists of the North East Library. Convened by Patrizia di Bello and Lily Evans-Hill from the Feminist Library.

Round-table two: The Politics of Opening up Access (1:27:20-end)

This roundtable thinks about digital, collaborative and interventional strategies of groups using archives, with contributions from Gina Nembhard and Lauren Craig of X Marks the Spot, Barby Asante, and Rosemary Grennan from Mayday Rooms. Convened by Althea Greenan from the Women’s Art Library and Catherine Grant.

Speaker bios

Panel 1:

Shaheen Merali is a curator and writer, based in London, who explores the intersection of art, cultural identity, and global histories. He has held positions at Central Saint Martins School of Art (2003-1995); a visiting lecturer and researcher at University of Westminster (2003-1997) and the Head of Department of Exhibition, Film and New Media at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2008-2003), one of the first Asian/POC to hold such a position in Germany’s history; a milestone appointment where he curated several exhibitions accompanied by publications, including The Black Atlantic – Modernity and Double Consciousness; Dreams and Trauma- Moving images and the Promised Lands (Palestine and Israel); New York States of Mind (toured to Queens Museum, NY) as well as leading the curation and global research for five years of programming. At the HKW he co-curated with Professor Wu Hung, Re-Imagining Asia, One Thousand years of Separation (toured later to the New Art Gallery, Walsall) and the 6th Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2006). Between 2009-8 he was the artistic director of Bodhi Art (Berlin, Mumbai, New York, and Singapore).

He has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues, including Michael Wutz (Galerie Klaus Gerrit Friese), Probir Gupta (Anant Art) and Rita Keegan (SLG) as well as editing a series of monographs including Tavares Strachan, I AM for Desert X (Isolated Labs), and JJ XI (Carrots Publishing). He has lectured at many institutions and was the co-convenor of This is Tomorrow: de-canonisation and decolonisation at the Courtauld Institute, London in November 2019 and leading the structured conversations for the AHRC’s Towards a National Collection programme Provisional Semantics Case Study, on Panchayat Collection held in the Special Collections of Tate Library. He is currently on the advisory board of the Live Art Development Agency (London) and a PhD candidate at Coventry University.

Stefan Dickers is the Special Collections and Archives Manager at Bishopsgate Institute and has been responsible for the development of the Institute’s collections on the history of London, protest and activism, and LGBTQIA+ Britain.

Holly Argent is an artist and researcher based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She founded and leads the Women Artists of the North East Library (2017-). Through both her artistic practice and work as project lead for the library, she is interested in creating contexts and perspectives for exploring artistic legacies and conflicting histories, always looking to emphasise a subjective position to reflect or expand upon complex autobiographical narratives. Later this year Holly will be the 2021 BALTIC Bothy artist in residence on the Isle of Eigg, Scotland.

Panel 2:

Rosemary Grennan is part of the collective that runs MayDay Rooms, an archive and educational space in London which seeks to connect histories and documents of radicalism and resistance to contemporary struggle. She is interest in building open access digital archives and experimenting with technologies and infrastructures associated with this. For this session Rosemary will talk about the project she has recently been working on with 0x2620 Berlin: Leftovers, a collaborative online archive of political ephemera. She is also completing a PhD in Material and Visual Culture from University College London.

Lauren Craig is a London-born artist of Jamaican heritage. Her practice encompasses her lived experience and auto-ethnographic approach as a cultural researcher, full-spectrum doula and celebrant, living and working in London and Central Italy. Through photography, video, text, installation, performance and writing, she explores equally broad themes of ecofeminism, spirituality, health, memory and the propositional. Craig’s current research/practice incorporates restorative writing circles with photographic, moving image and therapeutic and reparative archival methods to create and document the creative genealogies of contemporary celebration, rituals and commemoration within the practices of womxn of colour artists and their allies. Lauren aims to further her practice-based research on MRes Arts and Humanities, Royal College of Art (2020/2021) with the aim to continue at doctoral level in the UK. Lauren is a member of X Marks the Spot (XMTS) an ongoing artist archival research collective founded 2011 at Studio Voltaire London in response the work of Jo Spence and Judith Hopf. Since 2013 XMTS have worked the Women of Colour Index (WOCI) producing, Human Endeavour: A creative finding aid for the Women of Colour Archive, (2015) published with Women’s Art Library, Special Collections, Goldsmiths where the WOCI archive is held. The ‘Women of Colour Slide Show’ explores reparative methods through digitally restored 35mm slides in a meditative fusion of role call, tribute and invitation. This has been shown at Tate Britain (2018) and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Goldsmiths (2019).

Gina Nembhard has spent a number of years involved in art and design projects both practicing and assisting artists. Initially Gina developed her mixed media work and fine art textiles embroidery and later whilst studying, worked in a London based all-female architecture practice (A.T.A.P). Later her studies in sustainable product design led her to develop a business/practice combining both art/craft workshops focusing on a broad range of making including upholstery, textiles, stitch and dyeing. Within her work she tries to maintain a consistently sustainable perspective. As a member of X Marks the Spot, a collective of women practitioners and artists initially formed whilst in residency at Studio Voltaire, Gina has been involved in a number of talks, workshops and residencies on the subject of artists and archives.

Barby Asante is an artist, curator and researcher. Her artistic practice is concerned with the ever present histories and legacies of slavery and colonialism, exploring archival injustice and the importance of remebering through re-collecting, collating, excavating, through the action of mapping stories and narratives, collective writing, reenactment and creating spaces for transformation, ritual and healing. With a deep interest in black feminist and decolonial methodologies, Barby also embeds within her work notions of collective study, countless ways of knowing and dialogical practices that embrace being together and breathing together. Barby has taught in fine art programs in London, Berlin, Gothenburg and Rotterdam and was co-founder of agency for agency, a collaborative agency concerned with ethics, intersectionality and education in the contemporary arts who were mentors to the London-based sorryyoufeeluncomfortable collective. Her recent exhibitions and projects include: As Always a Painful Declaration of Independence: For Ama. For Aba. For Charlotte and Adjoa Diaspora Pavillion, Venice, 2017, BALTIC, Gateshead 2019, Bergen Kunsthall 2020: Black Togetherness as Lingua Franca with Amal Alhaag, Framer Framed, Amsterdam, 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, 2018; Baldwin’s Nigger R E L O A D E D, InIVA, London, 2014, Somerset House, London 2019; Cracks in the Curriculum: Countless Ways of Knowing, Serpentine Gallery, London 2018: SERP Revisited with Barbara Steveni, Flat Time House/ Peckham Platform, 2018. She is also on the boards of the Women’s Art Library and 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning. Barby is also a PhD Candidate within CREAM (Centre for Research in Education, Arts and Media) at the University of Westminster.

Summer Symposium: Challenging Archives on Saturday 19th June, 11am-3pm

Image: The Feminist Library on the move, 2019

11am-3:00pm, Saturday 19^th June 2021, on 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, the Panchayat Special Collection at the Tate Library; 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 (11:00am-12:30pm)

This round table will think about the collecting strategies of archives and grassroots collections within institutions. The panellists are Shaheen Merali from the Panchayat Special Collection at the Tate Library, Stefan Dickers from the Bishopsgate Institute and Holly Argent from the Women Artists of the North East Library. Convened by Patrizia di Bello and Lily Evans-Hill from the Feminist Library.

Lunch Break (12:30-1:30pm)

Round-table two: The Politics of Opening up Access (1:30-3pm)

This roundtable will think about digital, collaborative and interventional strategies of groups using archives, with contributions from Gina Nembhard and Lauren Craig of X Marks the Spot, Barby Asante, and Rosemary Grennan from Mayday Rooms. Convened by Althea Greenan from the Women’s Art Library and Catherine Grant.

You are welcome to join us afterwards for a casual conversation and drinks afterwards from 3:15-4pm!

If this age fails me: screening and discussion event with MayDay Rooms

18th of may 6pm bst, zoom

Screening of work by Peter Gidal, Kadeem Oak and Wilf Thust with a discussion based on the research of Jack Booth, Freya Field-Donovan, Lotte L.S. and Johanna Klingler soon to be published in Camera Forward! by MayDay Rooms.

Click here to sign up to eventbrite

In the 1970s the proliferation of photographic and cinematic practices on the Left put the means of image production and distribution into the hands of ordinary people. London in particular became a live and contested site for work which dealt with the conditions of contemporary civic life. Fifty years on, what should be drawn from the socially enmeshed practices of filmmakers and photographers who worked in London towards the end of the twentieth century?

Please join for a screening and discussion that uses the research and writing from forthcoming MayDay Rooms pamphlet Camera Forward! as the basis for a conversation between documents and people.

This event presents the first opportunity to view the digital transfer of Wilf Thust’s film Is That It? (Part 4), a video compiling work from young people at the Four Corners’ Cinema workshop. Thust’s film will be shown alongside more recent work by Peter Gidal and Kadeem Oak.

Screening:

Kadeem Oak, Lift, 2014, 3.54 min, Colour and black and white, sound, original format: 16mmm film, SD video transfer
Wilf Thust, Is That It? (Part 4), 1985, 11.18 mins, colour, original format: 16mm film, digital transfer
Wilf Thust, Where is the Gaiety?, 1973, 8.36 mins, black and white, sound, original format animated still photography, digital transfer
Peter Gidal, Assumption, 1997, 1.25 mins, Colour, original format: 16mm film, digital transfer

Following the screening, invited speakers Jack Booth, Freya Field-Donovan, Johanna Klingler and Lotte L.S. discuss their respective research projects into the relationship between the New Left, squatting and the media, the films of Wilf Thust, the photography of Terry Dennett, and the film collective Cinema Action.

Commissioned by MayDay Rooms to contribute to Camera Forward!, the speakers’ research offers four separate viewpoints into the MayDay Rooms archive, a public resource which contains masses of material relating to histories of radical resistance. The event aims to bring out connections and comparison between multiple sites of grassroots, radical and counter cultural archives in London. Including the Women’s Art Library and Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive, who are participating in this event via the Animating Archives project. Follow the links below for information on both MayDay Rooms and Animating Archives projects.

MayDay Rooms

Event organised by Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, Freya Field Donovan and Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe and is a collaboration between MayDay Rooms and Animating Archives. With the support of Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, Urban Intersections Experimental Collective (Birkbeck,) and the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art (UCL).

Camera Forward! will be published by MayDay in May/June please keep an eye on MayDay’s website and social media for more information.

Contributors Bios:

Jack Booth is a London-based writer. Current research interests are in 1970s Britain, particularly how the idea of communitarianism played out in cultural movements and self identified collectives. He completed his undergraduate degree at Goldsmiths and his master’s was in Film Studies at University College London.

Freya Field-Donovan is a PhD candidate in the History of Art department at University College London. Her PhD is titled A Strange American Funeral and focuses on dance and technological reproduction in 1940s America.

Peter Gidal is renowned as a writer and theorist, in particular for his highly influential publication ‘Structural Film Anthology’ (BFI 1976). He was an active member of the London Filmmakers’ Co-operative and Co-founder of the Independent Film-makers’ Association. His films have been screened nationally and internationally including at Tate; Hayward Gallery; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Film Theatre and at the Edinburgh Film Festival.

Johanna Klingler is an artist and researcher based between Berlin, Munich and London. She currently works on a PhD introducing the term “Emotional-Infrastructural Labour”. She is also a co-organizer of “Portal”, a platform that focuses on a cultural exchange between the German speaking world and the post-soviet area.

Lotte L.S. is a poet living in Great Yarmouth, at the far east of England. She has a pamphlet forthcoming with MayDay Rooms that works with their archives on 60s/70s cinema collectives across Europe to explore the dis/junctions between aesthetics, cinema, and revolutionary politics. She organises « no relevance » a series of multilingual readings with local and visiting poets, and accompanying pamphlets, in Great Yarmouth. She keeps an infrequent tinyletter, Shedonism.

Kadeem Oak is a London-based artist, filmmaker and programmer from Sheffield, South Yorkshire; his work is concerned with the vernacular and reconfiguration of artists’ moving image, storytelling and experimental documentation. Examining ideas surrounding black British identity, articulation of a sense of place, ecology and nature.

Wilf Thust is an artist whose work is a process of research into shapes, colours, movement and audience interaction. Born in Silesia, now Poland, and displaced to Germany by the Second World War, Thust has lived and worked in the UK since 1972. In 1974 he co-founded Four Corners, in 1975 he set up the Film Workshop in Bethnal Green and in 1980 he set up a film workshop with young people in Tower Hamlets, partly financed by Channel 4 in support of Independent filmmaking. Thust has taught and exhibited throughout his career and is currently an independent painter, maker and illustrator.

***

The title for the event is taken from the writings of the political theorist and pamphleteer James Harrington (1611-77). Harrington, who rose to prominence during the English Civil War, was one of the few commentators to analyse the causes of the conflict from a socio-economic perspective. His political writings pre-figure the methods of historical materialism by tracing the causes of the war to the transfer of land from crown, aristocracy and church to the gentry and the yeomanry in the century and a half before 1640. Bitterly disappointed by the course of the Civil War and arrested and imprisoned without trial in 1661 for plotting against the government, Harrington wrote the words above in an appeal to posterity for the dreams of the revolution. See Christopher Hill The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (1984) for further reading.

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 19^th 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.”

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

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.

Workshops for 2020-2021

Animating Archives will host three workshops during the academic year 2020-21, the first being an online session hosted by the Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths in November 2020.

This will be followed by a session at the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive in Spring 2021, which may be a hybrid online session with some access to the physical archive.

In Summer 2021, a one-day workshop will be held at Goldsmiths to bring together archivists, artists, writers and curators who are engaging with the key research questions of this project: how can we animate archives, particularly those of grassroots and radical organisations?

Check back to find out more details, or subscribe below to get updates via email.

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:

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:

18th of may 6pm bst, zoom

Screening of work by Peter Gidal, Kadeem Oak and Wilf Thust with a discussion based on the research of Jack Booth, Freya Field-Donovan, Lotte L.S. and Johanna Klingler soon to be published in Camera Forward! by MayDay Rooms.

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.