Women in Media Memory: Reflections From the Women Archives Exhibition (Book Chapter) (original) (raw)

The way a civilization transmits culture is through its memory. In terms of the protection of cultural memory, archives, where the elements of this culture are collected, serve as a cultural memory institution for protection and preservation. When it comes to archives, old and important documents, books, deeds and documents accumulated on a specific subject come to mind. Documents within the scope of the archive are generally materials that are recorded and stored by writing method. However, archives have existed in various forms since time immemorial. In the early antiquity, clay tablets were the communication material that enabled the recording and transmission of information. In later ages, in addition to paper, which has become the standard, inventions such as photographs, which have developed especially with media technologies, have begun to be seen as archival materials. Archival material can be archived to the extent that it preserves memory, and in this way it shows diversity. From Rosetta stone to medieval tapestries, Victorian house museums to African body tattoos, all kinds and sizes of different formations have the characteristics of historical archives. Thus, archives as traces of the past, created intentionally or not, are by no means limited to official institutions or state archives. Börge Justrell has pointed out that the most debated issue regarding archives throughout the twentieth century was how archival material was evaluated and sorted (Justrell, 2003). This debate is still ongoing today. With the development of communication technologies, archives and archival material have also changed. In particular, the ability to record the visual in a technical sense has brought a new dimension to archival and historical studies. The camera has become the ideal arm of a consciousness inclined to accumulate (Sontag, 2005). Although photography differs from written archives as a visual material, it provides a certainty that written archives cannot offer. In this study, the exhibition Kadın Arşivlerinden Yansıyanlar (Reflections from Women's Archives), a visual archive will