Making and Remaking Archives
ARTH 450 Advanced Seminar in the History of Art and Architecture: Making and Remaking Archives Fall 2018
December 15th, 2018 - January 15th, 2019
Institutional archives are material entities that are produced and consulted during an institution’s operations and history. Their creation involves a process of assembling, structuring and managing the traces of those who move or have moved through the institution’s operations. “Making and Remaking Archives” is a counter-archival project that visualises and acts upon Concordia University’s archival holdings.
For three months, fourteen archival-artist/historians explored tactics of working with, on, through and alongside archives via the work of artists, archivists, curators, historians, philosophers and writers. Discussions focused on the methods exercised to critique the power of archives across these varied practices.
Making an archive is an intentional act and one that is not value-neutral. Whether it is on the scale of federal law-making, community records or personal storage spaces, the process is laden. Remaking an archive, or counter-archiving, involves the application of attention and labour to the material generated (or destroyed, or ignored) during archival assembly and applies tactics of critical inquiry to explore what archives are, what they do, what they represent, and what they are missing. Counter-archiving wages these questions through action.
Each contribution to “Making and Remaking Archives” includes a representation of an original archival document, encountered by each archival-artist/historian, while working in Concordia’s Special Collections or Records Management and Archives fonds. A “remade” document pairs each original, and this is the counter-archival component brought to bear. The outcome is a collective of interventions wherein the fourteen responses assert agency upon the institution via its archive. Each work contributes conceptually both to the possibilities of the archive itself and what it means to layer stories upon documents.
Contributors: Sophia Arnold, Sarah Barone, Madeline Bogoch, Krystelle Gélineau, Nicole Kelly, Davika Khurana, Morgane Lecocq-Lemieux, Oona Ostrowski, Patricia Perez Rabelo, Genevieve Richard, Delaney Ryan, Elizabeth Sanders, Alyse Tunnell, Sophie Wonfor
Facilitator: Maya Rae Oppenheimer for ARTH 450 - Advanced Seminar in the History of Art and Architecture: Making and Remaking Archives