SHAKING THE ARCHIVE

The talk will focus on categories of witnessing, evidence, and the production of truth, that inturn necessitate new practices of listening. Through elaboration on recent projects, the talk will demonstrate the aesthetic strategies required to produce conditions for listening to testimony that are inaudible to the legal and political forms conventionally employed to produce truth and history.

Image: The Witness-Machine Complex, installation view, Sfeir-Semler Gallery Hamburg, 2022.
© Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery.

The archive has been one of the most persistent buzz-words in the international art world since the mid-1990s. While some claim that it is used with such abandon that its usefulness is questionable at best, others view the archive as an indication of an important theoretical framework, necessary to make sense of some of the most important artworks from this period and beyond. My presentation considers the archive art phenomenon through the lens of its historical roots, and asks to what extent archival theory can address the most pressing concerns of the present moment: from post-critique to environmental destruction, big data surveillance and so-called new materialism.

The Broken Archive was initiated in 2020 during the recent pandemic. The Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Berlin was working on their long-term project “The Whole Life: An Archive Project” and took an interest in our critical artistic research projects related to Florence (The “Cuddle of Renaissance”) and the Mediterranean region. Only at this point we started to consider that we never reflected upon our own institutional archive as Villa Romana. Which logics did it follow? These (and other) reflections led us to create The Broken Archive. This site brings together artistic projects that investigate the history of and present-day life in the Mediterranean region. The archive is “broken” because the region’s cultural wealth is barely perceived anymore. The Mediterranean region has become a buffer zone between the comfort zone of the North and the conflict zone of the South. The archive is also “broken” because the website is not designed as a canonical archive, but as an open, variable, dense network. A variety of artistic projects are organized into twelve cluster terms. These projects are presented with images, texts, PDFs, and films or trailers on the corresponding artists’ pages. Keywords and a search function offer additional orientation and a range of references. The Broken Archive seeks to create rhizomatic references across the transcontinental Mediterranean region where artistic works and texts emerge like archipelagos in search of community, resonance and connection.

Broken Archive is an initiative of Villa Romana in Florence and HKW Berlin. The Broken Archive brings together artistic projects that investigate the history of and present-day life in the Mediterranean region. The archive is “broken” because the region’s cultural wealth is barely perceived anymore. The Mediterranean region has become a buffer zone between the comfort zone of the North and the conflict zone of the South. It seeks to create rhizomatic references across the transcontinental Mediterranean region. Artistic works and texts emerge like archipelagos in search of community, resonance, connection. The Broken Archive is a project curated by the Villa Romana team under the directorship of Angelika Stepken. As a starting point, it brings together the numerous projects that have been carried out here in recent years. The intention is to develop the archive in a dynamic and interactive manner and offer a common platform to many other artists and projects to come.

Moritz Nebenführ works as an art historian, curator and dramaturge. In addition to studying art theory and philosophy at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and The New School, New York, he realized exhibition projects e.g. at the Künstlerhaus Bremen, Badischer Kunstverein and Artists Space, New York.

The Tokyo Reel Film Festival is a performative film festival that assumes its programming from a collection of 20 films that were safeguarded by a Japanese solidarity unit with Palestine and subsequently digitized, restored, and subtitled by the collective Subversive Film. It is a one-time film festival, with a fixed program, a poster to mark the event, a catalogue, and a 100-day running schedule at Gloria Kino in Kassel. The performance involves interventions on issues related to expanding the limits of thinking around concepts such as restoration, activation, and representation, while at the same time writing an account of a gesture of solidarity that has been overlooked, overshadowed, and dismissed. Through a film program of an archival film collection, such a practice becomes a vehicle of alternative narratives, that are independent, personal, and cinematic. The contribution will include an overview of the Tokyo Reel film festival performance at Documenta 15 and the panel discussions that were conducted during the festival, as a way to excavate knowledge not only around the restored films, but also about its context, situated in its time and space, between Japan and the Middle East.

Subversive Film is a cinema research and production collective that aims to cast new light on historic works related to Palestine and the surrounding region, to engender support for film preservation and to investigate archival practices. Their long-term and ongoing projects explore this cine-historic field including digitally reissuing previously overlooked films, curating rare film screening cycles, subtitling rediscovered films, producing publications, and devising other forms of interventions. Formed in 2011, Subversive Film is based between Ramallah and Brussels.

Following the coup d’état in 1980, Turkey in the 1990s witnessed both the visualization of public culture thanks to the rise of television and video technologies as well as massive human rights violations resulting from the counterinsurgency measures by the state. While television channels communicated public reality predominantly within the official framework of the state, the collective practice of what I call videowork, became the primary means for producing and archiving the unofficial visual documents of a decade characterized by rights violations, protests, fact-finding missions, trials, testimonies, alternative public gatherings, etc. Due to a lack of non-governmental archival institutions, these video records of the decade, mostly reside in a dispersed and uncatalogued manner in the depositories of institutions or personal collections. Drawing upon ethnographic, media archeological, and archival research, this presentation explores the collective practice of videowork and the video records in the context of state-sponsored violence and violations of the 1990s in Turkey, in terms of their archival potential to testify to historical injustices and communicate hope and resilience for justice to come.

This presentation shows the work of the women's peace anti-militaristic and anti-fascist collective Women in Black from Belgrade (Serbia), with a focus on the activities of creating archive of this group. I will analyse how feminists opposed politics of militarism and nationalism, during the past 30 years, working on constant alarming the Serbian society, but also on permanent peace education. The continuous archiving of texts, videos and photographs from every street action, every visit to the place of a crime, every workshop or meeting of the Women in Black network, as well as writing appeals, announcements, reports and books, have built a network of alternative knowledge. In the introduction to her book Agnostic Mourning - Political Dissidence and the Women in Black, Athena Athanasiou says about this group: "They all never tired of letting me know that their collective and dissident mal d'archive was all worth it.” The presentation will discuss how to build a movement of all those whose voice remains on the margins of a society that will not take responsibility for war and crimes? How violence from the battlefield spills over into post-war society? How can the feminist movement fight peacefully against the militarism with the help of art collectives and related activist groups? These and numerous similar questions will be answered through the presentation of the activities from the Women in Black archive.

Image: 20th anniversary of Women in Black, Republic Square, Belgrade, Serbia, 2011

Women in Black (Serbia) is a feminist, antimilitarist peace organization founded in Belgrade. On 9th October 1991, the group began a public nonviolent protest against the war in Yugoslavia; the Serbian regime’s policy; nationalism; militarism and all forms of hatred, discrimination and violence. The founders of the group are: Neda Božinović, Staša Zajević, Jelka Kljajić Imširović, Lina Vušković, Lepa Mlađenović, Gordana Radosavljević and Daša Duhaček. Since 1991, they have organized more than 1500 protests, most of which took place in Belgrade's streets and squares, but also in other cities of Serbia and Montenegro, throughout the former Yugoslavia, many cities of Europe, and around the world. Antimilitarism and non-violence are their political choices. Women in Black reject military power and the production of arms for the killing of people, of human working nature, and for the domination of one sex, nation, or state over another. They speak out for the recognition of difference, for reciprocity, respect for nature, and for development in accordance with the needs of the civil population as opposed to those of the civil and military oligarchy and their national interests. As a group WIB have made visible nonviolent resistance to war, sexism, nationalism, in short, all aspects of violence towards and discrimination against women and all those people different ethnically, religiously, culturally, sexually, ideologically and built a women's solidarity network, peace coalition and alliance against all patriarchal political control over women, against ethnic homogenization, independent of all state and ethnic borders and divisions. WIB Serbia have initiated the International Network of Women in Black and have since organized ten meetings and we are active members of a number of international peace networks. WIB have demanded a permanent confrontation with the past, accountability for war and war crimes, trying all those suspected of war crimes in the Hague tribunal. The group has sought a confrontation with both the moral and political collective responsibility, through street actions, appeals, petitions, campaigns, attendance at commemorations, seminars and conferences. Over the years, the group has produced a women's alternative anti-military history and recorded the other into history by means of extensive publications; organized permanent peace education through seminars, workshops, courses about feminism, pacifism/antimilitarism, nonviolence, interethnic/intercultural solidarity, reproductive rights, and alter-globalization. The group has received a number of international recognitions including The first Millennium Peace Prize for Women from UNIFEM, the UN Development Fund for Women and have been nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Özge Çelikaslan engages in several archive initiatives in Turkey and Europe. In her talk, she will discuss her collective practices regarding activist archiving, digital technologies and accessibility, archival care and affect, obsolete media, and political nostalgia. Çelikaslan is a PhD candidate at the Braunschweig University of Art. She was a member of several film and video collectives. Her works were shown in biennials and festivals, recently at the 17th Istanbul Biennial. She is co-founder of the digital media archive of social movements bak.ma.

bak.ma (means "don’t look" in Turkish)* digital media archive of social movements appeared following the massive urban protests in 2013 known as Gezi Park Resistance. By collectivizing knowledge and memory and operating as a space of empowerment bak.ma radicalizes the politics of the archive and indicates possibilities for creating a living memory of the social movements. bak.ma consists of voluminous video collections beginning from the 1960s until today covering political incidents and movements in Turkey’s history. As a constantly growing archive with a participatory approach, the users generate the content by bringing the video activist footage in, which leads to turning it into a collaborative archive. Starting from 2018 users from other countries started uploading their video recordings, texts, photographs, and sound recordings. * “.ma” is an URL extension signifying ‘media archive’, which is originally the nation URL extension in Morocco.

Martina Muzi is a designer, curator, and educator based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her work engages critically with design through its complex material logistics, its geopolitical cultures, and its effects on social formations from the family to the market, from the atelier to the school.

The history of the internet is often overfocused on the grandfathers who created its architecture and protocol. But the internet is more than a network of cables, servers, and computers—it is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use. In Cyberfeminism Index, a variety of hackers, scholars, artists, and activists consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology through more than 700 short entries of radical techno-critical activism. Both a vital introduction for laypeople and a robust resource guide for educators, Cyberfeminism Index—an anti-canon, of sorts—celebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminism’s long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy.