Lucia Farinati, Catherine Grant, Althea Greenan & Maria Tamboukou, Barbara Mahlknecht

Activating the Archive

Transmission #6 - 28 Feb 2019

Fragility gives us responsibility—to take care.

(Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 2018)

Archives are fragile. Their material existence relies upon physical maintenance, supporting infrastructure and personal care. At the same time, archives are a central as a site of contemporary politics.

By taking care and preserving the archive's live, feminist activists, thinkers, artists, curators, performers and writers activate the archive, producing interventions that propose new perspectives on how to inhabit the present differently. Activating the Archive. Artistic Politics, Feminist Viewpoints unfoldes and discusses practices of re-enactment, sound, listening, narration, storytelling, and performance that explore the archive in its potential and as a source for re-thinking and re-organising the relations of past/present, temporality/space, historiography/narration storytelling/memory, affects/feelings from a feminist viewpoint.

Lucia Farinati is a curator and a Ph.D. researcher at the Kingston School of Art, London. She has curated several sonic art projects under the collective name Sound Threshold as well as contributed to conferences and publications on the politics of listening and creative archives for international festivals, museums, and galleries. She is the co-author of The Force of Listening, Errant Bodies Press, 2017. She is currently working on an extensive research project on Audio Arts magazine (1973-2007) in collaboration with Tate Archive.
[http://www.soundthreshold.org%20/]www.soundthreshold.org 
http://www.kingston.ac.uk/research/research-degrees/research-degree-students/profile/lucia-farinati-121/

Catherine Grant is Senior Lecturer in the Art and Visual Cultures Departments at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently working on the re-enactment of feminist histories in contemporary art. The project includes the essays Fans of Feminism: re-writing histories of second-wave feminism (2011) and A Time of One’s Own (2016), both published in the Oxford Art Journal. She is also working on an edited collection entitled Fandom as Methodology with Kate Random Love, due out in Autumn 2019, and is the co-editor of Girls! Girls! Girls! (2011) and Creative Writing and Art History (2012).

Althea Greenan works in Special Collections and Archives at the Goldsmiths University of London curating the Women’s Art Library collection. She has developed a programme with artists and academic researchers to help realise new art and curatorial projects that develop alongside the collection. She has published on the work of women artists since the 1980s as well as on the Women’s Art Library collection such as How images are the making of the Women's Art Library/Make, Art Libraries Journal, 2007 and The Women’s Art Library, in: Feminisms and Museums: intervention, disruption and change ed Jenna C Ashton, 2018).

Maria Tamboukou is Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of East London, UK and Leverhulme Research Fellow in 2018-19. Maria's research activity develops in the areas of philosophies and epistemologies in the social sciences, feminist theories, narrative analytics, and archival research. Writing histories of the present is the central focus of her work, currently configured as an assemblage of feminist genealogies. Recent publications include the monographs Sewing, Writing and Fighting, Gendering the Memory of Work, Women Workers’ Education, as well as the co-authored book The Archive Project. https://sites.google.com/site/mariatamboukoupersonalblog/home

Barbara Mahlknecht is a researcher, curator, teacher, and art educator. Currently, she is working on her Ph.D. at the Goldsmith University London (AHRC scholarship), and she is a lecturer and researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her work focuses on the intertwining of curating, social reproduction and queer/feminist practice and theory; on the ideologies and histories of arts education, and on the archive. She has co-conceptualised a variety of exhibitions, conferences, and workshops and has presented at international conferences. She is part of networks such as Another Roadmap School/Another Roadmap for Arts Education.