A Wet Archive Research Stories event
Hosted by the Women’s Art Library in Special Collections and Archives, Goldsmiths University of London
Tue December 5th 2023
2pm
Join us in the Women’s Art Library’s current exhibition: A Wet Archive as the artist, Esmeralda Valencia Lindström explores resonances with current research presented by Marie Theresa Crick and others round the table. Esmeralda is one of the shortlisted awardees of the 2023 WAL/FR Art in the Archive Bursary responding to the concept of the Slow Return.
This informal discussion is inspired by ideas raised by Esmeralda Valencia Lindström’s research for A Wet Archive, and her discovery or recovery of the hidden life of the archive’s materials and its built environment as manifested through fungi and attempts at tracing water damage through the Rutherford building. The result is a uniquely live display that spans the height of the Library occupying the Buchi Emecheta Space on the top floor as well as featuring an installation in the Special Collections and Archives lobby and study space. A Wet Archive generates a new perspective on the archive as a not-so-static entity, giving us the space to consider what resists preservation as well what is overlooked in these spaces of recorded histories. Esmeralda will be joined by Marie Theresa Crick (PhD Visual Cultures) who will introduce her research and the overlaps with A Wet Archive.
Marie Theresa Crick’s research positions a ‘Feminine-to-Come’, a radical within but ‘not yet’, to offer potentials to reorientate what was transmitted, in forms of ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’ within the Irish Catholic mother and daughter relation, to the present by the displacement of women from the Republic of Ireland to London, in the late 1950s. Thus, seeking to illuminate ‘the livedness’ in the Irish Catholic maternal imagination through a methodology that flows with a re-reading of Luce Irigaray’s shared air, Marie Theresa’s film practice of watery filmic bodies of breath and movement in collective embodied research spaces, to inhabit a reorientation of ‘fixed’ archives of the Irish State and Catholicism. Marie Theresa will be thinking about the potentials of fluidity in a ‘wet archive’ and especially the Irish book which was found by the water in Esmeralda Valencia Lindström’s exhibition.
The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by Sophie J Williamson titled “Architectures of Inverted Bodies” available from the exhibition as recommended reading. For copies please email Althea Greenan a.greenan@gold.ac.uk or visit the exhibition.
The exhibition is displayed on two sites in the Rutherford Building, in the Special Collections & Archives entrance on the ground floor and the Buchi Emecheta space on the second floor, weekdays between 10:00 am and 06:00 pm until 26 January 2023. This exhibition received support from Arts Council of England. 
