The Counter-Archive WorkshopThe Counter-Archive Workshop

"The workshop imagines a network of restorative Counter-Archives, amassing evidence and collecting knowledge in alternative ways in order to re-evaluate inherited histories. The Counter-Archive workshop offers the space to plan new kinds of bottom-up counter-archives in existing grassroots or institutional host archives. Several action scenarios will be discussed, from zines to social media, and from distributing recordings to productive interfaces with existing institutional platforms.” (Collecting Otherwise)

The Counter-Archives workshop will be documented and later made available on Miro and as a sampled ‘documentation-as-storytelling’ audio file.

• Introductions to the organisers, invited projects, and guests – positioning the Counter-Archive Workshop (10 minutes)
• Counter-archive statements/strategies from the invited projects and participants (30 minutes)
• Introductions to the workshop guests and the counter-archive statements/tools they have brought along in response to the advance questions (15 minutes)
• Counter-Archive Workshop: collective and participatory imagining of scenarios using tools and statements that have been brought along (40 minutes, with a swap between tables after 20 minutes)

Table 1

• Thinking through objects and narratives (evidence and interpretation)
• Thinking through collecting protocols (acquisition strategies, estimations, value judgments).

Table 2

• Thinking through networks and relationships (donors, institutions, grassroots organisations, archival communities).
• Thinking through communications and archival interfaces
• Collective feedback round and close (15 minutes).

The workshop is organised by Archiving Absence (gta archives) and Collecting Otherwise (Nieuwe Instituut), together with participants Fluid Archive (The Parity Group) and Sonic Archive (Sekundos) from the ETH Department of Architecture, and with guest Lidewij Tummers (Tussen Ruimte). The collaborative workshop is part of the 7th edition of the annual Parity Talks at ETH Zürich.

Please register via the ETH Parity Group