Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (original) (raw)
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Reframing the archive International Conference on Photography and Visual Culture
ARCHIVAL INTERVENTION TO REMEDIATE THE BIASED REPRESENTATION OF BLACK BRITISHNESS The case of passion of remembrance (1986) by Sankofa flm and video collective This paper investigates o the use of archival materials in the flm The Passion of Remembrance by Sankofa. It shows how the visual archive is a site of both remediation and intervention in the construction of identities and collective memory. This flm establishes a compelling dialogue in past and present registers encompassing the complex interplay between the process of forgetting and remembering inherent in the (de)construction of black Britishness. By incorporating visual material disseminated by British media, which is based on stereotypes, the flm effectively constructs a counter-narrative to challenge misrepresentation. This paper will frstly contextualise the broader historical and socio-cultural framework in which Sankofa emerged. This contextualisation is crucial for comprehending the collective’s deliberate utilization of the archive as a fundamental source of raw material of remediation. Subsequently, the signifcance of The Passion of Remembrance will be underscored, elucidating both its use of archival materials and the underlying purposes they serve in the flm’s narrative. This will be achieved through the analysis of a specifc scene. Ultimately, this paper will demonstrate how the collective’s intervention in the archive facilitates the creation of a new representation of black Britishness no longer pigeonholed to the margins.
Excavating the Photo-Archive: Exploring Memory and Healing through the Creation of Radical Archives
The Interdependent: Journal of Undergraduate Research in Global Studies, 2020
This project considers the use of photographic archives in works of two contemporary artists, Diego Cirulli and Ayana V. Jackson, because their work results in the production of radical archives. Radical archives depart from traditional archives in curatorial intention, form, and function to reveal narratives previously unexplored. Through the analysis of the archival artwork of an Argentine artist and a North American artist, this project explores the radical archive as a mechanism of repurposing knowledge and memory transmission in two specific regions that bear unique histories of oppression. These artists provide alternative methods of knowledge production to traditional archives. Archival art is best understood by analyzing its construction, performative aspects, and engagement with public feelings. The production of radical archives through archival art has therapeutic effects that enable healing processes in response to histories of trauma and misrepresentation not only for the individual artist but for the community. This work is a contribution to the developing study of radical archives in terms of memory and historical representation.
Introduction to (W)archives: Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2020)
2021
Digital and data technologies are actively transforming the archives of contemporary warfare. Bringing together a range of scholarly perspectives and artistic practices, (W)archives investigates digital archiving as an integral technology of warfare and how artists respond to these changes. Throughout the book, the (w)archive emerges as a term to grasp the extended materiality of war today, wherein digital archiving intersects with images, bodies, senses, infrastructures, environments, memories, and emotions. The essays explore how this new digital materiality of war reconfigures the archival impulses that have shaped artistic practices over the last decades, and how archives can be mobilized to articulate political demands, conjure new forms of evidence, and make palpable the experience of living with war. Contributions by DANIELA AGOSTINHO, HEBA Y. AMIN, ARIELLA AZOULAY, SVEA BRAUNERT, ANTHONY DOWNEY, SOPHIE DYER, ANDERS ENGBERG-PEDERSEN, SOLVEIG GADE, CRISTIÁN GOMEZ-MOYA, SOFIE LEBECH, AIMÉE ZITO LEMA, KATHRIN MAURER, KEVIN MCSORLEY, DIMA SABER, ORAIB TOUKAN, SARAH TUCK, LOUISE WOLTHERS, ARKADI ZAIDES https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/warchives/
Compelling Evidence: the mobilization of the Carlton Hill photographic archive across time
2017
Our project bridges the field of social work with the field of photography and archival scholarship and our interdisciplinary research team includes scholars from within social sciences and visual studies. We explore connected, transnational histories through a cultural framework and try to reconcile different viewpoints by working across historical spaces. In this paper, we focused on a single British case study, the Carlton Hill collection in Brighton that documented the area prior to it being demolished under the pretext of ‘slum’ clearance. We presented a small number of visual interventions and activities that were timed to coincide with the IVM conference in Brighton in September 2015. The collection continues to live on; the photographs, in their manifestations as physical objects or online images, continue to communicate through their itinerant languages. Our research shows that archival objects do not stay in place, the object and the auspices shift over time. New reworking...
Killed Negatives: The Unseen Photographic Archives
Archivaria, 2010
On a beaucoup écrit au sujet des projets photographiques à grande échelle de Roy E. Stryker avec la Farm Security Administration à Washington et la Standard Oil Company du New Jersey, projets qui ont eu lieu entre 1935 et 1950. Cet article est consacré à l'un de ses projets les moins biens connus, la Pittsburgh Photographic Library (1950-1955), et aux archives qui ont été créées par ce projet. Ces archives photographiques contiennent des ensembles d'images qui, pendant plus de cinquante ans, étaient pour la plupart inaccessibles; depuis la fin du projet en 1955, elles avaient en effet été emboîtées et entreposées. Stryker et ses photographes qualifiaient ces images de « mises à mort » (« kills »), ou de « négatifs mis à mort » (« killed nega tives »). Dans un premier temps, cet article offre un aperçu historique de la carrière de Stryker et de sa relation avec la photographie jusqu'au début de la Pittsburgh Photographic Library. Ensuite, il examine la nature de ses « négatifs mis à mort », en les traitant comme des documents d'archives photographiques, tout en explorant les frontières discursives entre le texte environnant, les annotations de rédaction et les images elles-mêmes. Enfin, l'article montre que l'on peut donner un sens non seule ment aux documents que les archivistes ont mis en valeur en les classant et en les décrivant, mais aussi aux documents qui demeurent cachés dans leurs voûtes. ABSTRACT Much has been written about Roy E. Stryker's large-scale photographic projects with the Farm Security Administration in Washington, DC and Standard Oil Company of New Jersey-projects lasting from 1935 to 1950. This paper is devoted to one of his less well-known projects, the Pittsburgh Photographic Library (1950-1955), and the archives that subsequently evolved from this project. Within this picture archives there is a subset of images that for over fifty years were mostly inacces sible; since the end of the project in 1955, they were boxed-up and stored out of sight. Stryker and his photographers referred to these images as kills or killed negatives. First, the paper offers a broad historical overview of Stryker's career and his relation ship to photography leading up to the start of the Pittsburgh Photographic Library. Second, the paper examines the nature of Stryker's killed negatives, recontextualizing them as archival photographic records and explores the discursive boundaries at work between surrounding text, editorial markings, and the images themselves. Third, the paper demonstrates that meaning can be derived not just from what records archivists bring to life through their arrangement and descriptive practices, but also through those records that remain buried in their vaults.
Critical Interventions, 2018
In the mid-1990s, Jacques Derrida’s book Archive Fever (1995) sparked a lively theoretical debate that focused on practices of reading the archive, the relationship of the archive to power, and the gaps within the archive. We need to ask, given the context of colonial and various forms of racial power, in what other ways can we consider the archive? Anthony has drawn attention to the “archive of the ordinary,” and a sense that the interpretation of all archives might turn around questions of representation and ways of reimagining a past. What are the ways in which we can reimagine ways of being through archives that are not constructed by colonial and racial power but by the once subaltern, the colonized? These are some of the questions with which this article will engage, using the photographs of Movie Snaps Photographic Studio in Cape Town as an entry point to consider contemporary issues of the visual, memory, and representation.
Archive-based Art: Destabilizing the Power of the Archive while Declaring its Victory
But because archive-based art essentially reuses physical traces, the extent to which much of it truly and fundamentally threatens the ubiquitous power of the archive is questionable. While it provides a much-needed counter memory and plays an essential role in analyzing historical discourse, questioning problematic representations and attracting the spectator’s attention to illusions of credibility and completeness, it simultaneously asserts the power of the archive by positioning itself in relation to it, dwelling within its aesthetic, and reacting to its narratives.
Paavo Järvensivu, researcher of economic culture and member of the Mustarinda Artist Association, and Karoliina Lummaa, literary researcher, explored the archives of the Finnish Museum of Photography to curate for the Helsinki Photography Biennial a show that explores the development of our relationship with nature. They wanted to see what the archived photographs are like and what they tell us about how natural resources are used in Finland, what the attitudes of Finns are towards wild animals, and what they think about nature and our place in it. This text is based on conversations that art historians Sofia Lahti and Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger from the Finnish Museum of Photography had with Järvensivu and Lummaa.
2020
The following thesis surveys artistic utilizations of the archive and underscores its role as a tool for knowledge disruption. Fluctuating between theoretical meanderings, autobiographical reflections, and the analysis of artwork, I propose one avenue in which to reinvigorate conversations around the archive began by Derrida in Archive Fever and by Hal Foster in “Archival Impulse.” Approaching the archive as both a theoretical container and as a charged artist medium, I argue for a new archival impulse — one that embraces opaqueness and mess over clarity and order. Comprised of eight individual sections, and a parallel dialogue presented in the form of extended footnotes, the thesis borrows formal and stylistic strategies from arenas of creative non-fiction, diaristic writing, and art historical analysis. Archive scholars — Derrida, Foster, Michel Foucault, Annet Dekker — are cross-examined with thinkers in fields of queer theory, ecology, art history, philosophy, media studies, per...