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.
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:
Further Resources:
This workshop is generously funded by CHASE Doctoral Partnership.
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