Archival Interactions: Performing Intersectional Counter-Archives
On Thursday 30 June, the symposium 'Archival Interactions: Performing Intersectional Counter-Archives' will take place in Amsterdam. It is part of the long-term NWO project The Critical Visitor, in which Het Nieuwe Instituut is a partner. Setareh Noorani and Hannah Dawn Henderson will give a presentation on behalf of Collecting Otherwise.
30 June 2022 10:00 - 22:00
Specifically, this symposium considers dimensions of performance and performativity in archival interactions: namely, interactions between and among archivists & records; scholars & documents; artists & archival scraps; artists & archivists; archives & counter-archives. In these interactions, what affects are elicited? What knowledge is produced? For many, performance remains fundamentally anarchic - defined by ephemerality in ways that place it in an inevitably antagonistic relationship to the archive. We also invite further critical consideration of the notion of being 'counter to' an institutional archive. Can one be 'counter' in the post/de/colonial? When we work with certain archives, do we foreclose the possibility of 'countering'? Can colonial archives be mobilized in a counter archival frame?
Keeping present the crucial role of "canonical black feminist work" in shaping intersectional legal work and theory, we invite participants to take up Jennifer Nash's crucial question: "Who owns intersectionality, and who steals it?" (2019: 26). In our reflections at the symposium, we wish to engage intersectionality because in Nash's words, it "offers the sense of collective world-making, and because it is the extension of a certain form of agency" (Ibid., 27)..
See the website of the Amsterdam University of the Arts for more information and registration.
The Critical Visitor
The Critical Visitor focuses on museology and archival studies: who is represented and who is not, who has access to these spaces of cultural identity and institutional memory? Led by Dirk van den Heuvel (Jaap Bakema Study Center, Het Nieuwe Instituut/ TU Delft), Eliza Steinbock (Leiden University, main applicant) and Hester Dibbits (Reinwardt Academy, Amsterdam), fifteen partners including Amsterdam Museum, IHLIA and the Van Abbemuseum will work over the next five years on intersectional tools that not only expose but also dismantle mechanisms of exclusion and oppression. In addition to two PhD positions, the project includes a series of field laboratories, archive interactions with artists and a salon series to involve professionals and the public in the project.