Experimentations With the Archive: A Roundtable Conversation

Abstract

This roundtable took place via Google Hangouts in October 2019 and was moderated by Julietta Singh. The conversation was initiated to think through how artists, academics, seed librarians and archivists engage the notion of 'archive' across geographies and temporalities. This form of virtual engagement left space for multiple levels of conversation on the archive and archival practice. The purpose of the discussion was to think through the politics of collection, preservation and the embodiment of the archive.Without making the notion of the archive appear banal, the discussion provides insight into the uses and manifestations of the archive for each of the participants. The conversation traverses questions of archival practice in South Africa, the Virgin Islands and the Black American South, thereby offering a wide scope of geographic engagement with how lingering remainders of slavery and colonialism become part of the soil and landscape. In this experimental dialogue, the participants subvert linear situated notions of archives and archival practice through providing insight into seeds and seed libraries as a form of survival; the visual and material archives of dirt, ruins and abandoned buildings; leaky body archives as experimentation; and collaborative 'memory work'. The participants in this roundtable bring together new connections, ways of reading, seeing and experiencing praxis, theory and the embodiment of the archive from a feminist, queer and decolonial perspective.Transcription note: The conversation has been slightly edited to allow for the multiple engagements and responses of the panelists to exist alongside each other. Side comments, responses and suggestions have been left in the text and appear in smaller font aligned to the right. Above various sections in the text, we have added key words that function as an index of the conversation. 931878F ER0010.1177/0141778920931878Feminist ReviewBelle et al. research-article2020 open space LA VAUGHN: I like the concept of 'ancient futures' very much. It speaks to how archives are about the pastpresentfuture. They affect all temporalities.HOLLY: I truly think of collection development policies as inherently political. We as archivists and 'memory workers' (a phrase I love, from my comrade colleagues Skyla Hearn and Jarrett

Archival Experiments, Notes and (Dis)orientations

“…Following this editorial is a roundtable conversation curated with the aim of bringing together different academics and practitioners from different disciplines to collectively explore the notion of ‘archives’ from a queer, feminist and decolonial perspective. Chaired by Julietta Singh, whose recent book No Archive Will Restore You (2018) offers a queer mediation on the body archive and is reviewed by Chandra on the Feminist Review Blog , the conversation features La Vaugh Belle, a visual artist working with performance, painting, installation and public art to ‘make visible the remembered’ (Belle et al , 2020, this issue). It also includes Zayaan Khan, a food activist, artist, writer and researcher archiving cultural practices of seed, from music to play and fashion, and Holly A. Smith, College Archivist at Spelman College, who collects and preserves archival material concerning women of the African diaspora.…”