Practices in the Archive of a Life / Lives

How can artists’ lives, including their political engagement, be preserved through archiving? This workshop in cooperation with the queer-feminist archive LIESELLE brings together artists, archivists, curators, digital information networkers and others to share their practices and experiences.

There are significant collections in the Ruhr region that archive its rich history of human rights social movements. As part of her research exploring practices that open collections to future creative thinking, current Senior Fellow Althea Greenan is conducting a workshop co-organised with Tahani Nadim, research professor at the College. Katja Teichmann, volunteer archivist at the LIESELLE archive at Ruhr University Bochum, will introduce their important queer-feminist collection as the starting point for discussion, inspired by the recent publication Aktivist*innen im Archiv and the archives of Afro-German activist Fasia Jansen (1929-1997). The workshop brings together artists, archivists, curators, digital information networkers and others to share their respective practices and experiences of the following:

• dealing with what remains of a life/lives
• preserving the political impetus of lives and collections (and wrestling with institutions)
• publishing as a form/continuation of archiving

Contributors include Julia Lübbecke whose photographs feature in Aktivist*innen im Archiv and Dr Felicity Allen, Dr Janice Cheddie and Jessa Mockridge who bring their experience in cultural institutions in the UK working at the intersection of artistic practices, publishing and archiving as activist, decolonising work. The discussions will be documented as part of Althea Greenan’s enquiry into the responsibilities of custodianship to the political life’s work in artists’ archives.

Registration

If you are interested in participating in the workshop, please contact Dr Althea Greenan by 15 April: 

E-Mail

Location

The first day of the workshop (24 April) takes place at Ruhr University Bochum / the LIESELLE archive. The second part on 25 April takes place at the College in Essen.

ALTHEA GREENAN

Dr Althea Greenan has been curator at the Women’s Art Library (WAL) at Goldsmiths, University of London, since 2004 – a collection of various forms of art documentation dating from 1900 to the present. It includes archives of historical organisations as well as individuals, with a focus on women artists’ collective work in the UK, and was founded in response to the lack of educational resources on women’s art.
Learn more about her work and research project in this feature interview.