Rethinking Archives: History, Media and Memory

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These workshops take the appointment of an archivist for the first time to Arnolfini, the centre for contemporary arts in Bristol, as an opportunity to explore issues and questions relating to the archiving of contemporary art exhibitions, live art and other forms of intangible, or event-based culture. Using raw materials gathered from the past forty-five years of Arnolfini's programmes, the workshops will bring together archivists, theorists, artists, historians and members of Arnolfini's audience to explore a series of interconnected problems and questions.(titles are working titles to indicate content)Workshop 1: Audience MemoriesWhat is the role of memory in relation to history? Focussing on two events (performances or exhibitions) from Arnolfini's archive (one long past, one from the recent past), this workshop will explore and record audience memories of those events, using the expertise of oral historians and theorists of memory to address how these memories are to be elicited and included in the archive. Workshop 2: Digitisation and RemediationMedia theorists, archivists and artists will address the role of media in preservation, how the artwork changes through its translation into a different medium, the materiality of the archive and the impact of digitization. Issues explored will include questions of decontextualisation and remediation. The workshop will also consider the potential of on-line software for user-led archiving, through which users of an archive can examine others' selections from the archive, and ask what is the significance of this for hierarchies of knowledge, and the relationship between archive and text/exhibit.Workshop 3: Time and the ArtworkThe third workshop will consider questions relating to time and the temporality of the artwork - notably the irony and ethics of preserving work which is part of a modernist attack on the museum, the archive or the art market and which is intended to refuse either commodification or archiving by having a built-in half-life, being designed to decay or to exist only in the present moment. Workshop 4: Repetition and ReconstructionThis workshop will examine the uses of archival material in restagings and reconstructions either by the gallery or the museum or by artists' themselves. Questions of authenticity, the relationship between the real and the copy, and the changes in audience experience, will all be addressed. In all the workshops, archival materials relating to specific events will be used as case studies and added to during the session, and the workshops themselves will be recorded and become part of the archive. The workshops will be held over four consecutive months and participants will be a combination of invited participants from regional museums, art organizations and archives, invited international theorists and artists, and an open call for participation from members of Arnolfini's audience. The discussions that result will influence the ways in which Arnolfini's archive is developed for the future.