Archive Research Community talk: Archival materiality as connective tissue – 17th January

 Dear all

Short notice of a talk tomorrow afternoon that some of you may be interested in attending.

Please find below details of the next Archive Research Community talk, which will take place online next Wednesday 17^th January at 1.30pm. The speakers are Sue Breakell (University of Brighton Design Archives) and Wendy Russell (British Film Institute) who are the co-editors of the recent collection The Materiality of the Archive: Creative Practice in Context (2023). The Zoom link for the talk is here: https://shu.zoom.us/my/jf1788 We look forward to seeing you!

Archival materiality as connective tissue  

Sue Breakell, University of Brighton Design Archives and Wendy Russell, BFI  

In this session we will discuss our newly-published co-edited volume The Materiality of the Archive: Creative Practice in Context (Routledge).  Through this volume the editors foster collaborative approaches to archives of creative practice, harnessing the potential of materiality as connective tissue across a range of disciplines and practices. Taking a broad view of the archive’s agency, its focus on archives of creative practice emphasises their generative possibilities, foregrounding the fluidity, blurred boundaries and expanded notions of the archive that are characteristic of creative practices and their complex materialities and immaterialities.  

In our conversation, we will contextualise ideas of archival materiality including its articulation in the curation of the volume’s contents, which move outwards from archive studies through an interdisciplinary frame in four sections: ‘In the Archive: Practices and Encounters’; ‘With the Archive: Energy’; ‘About the Archive: Technologies’; and ‘Beyond the Archives: Expanding the Frame’.  Through this sequence the book moves outwards from the archive, yet is always held in relation to it, in a ‘diagram of active forces’ (Yaneva 2020).  Breakell will also reference her own chapter in the volume, which uses the archival fonds as itself an object of material analysis. Lastly, Russell will highlight some of her recent work on the material engagement with archives at the BFI, specifically with the continuity script for Kes.

James Fenwick