RADICAL ARCHIVES was a two-day conference (April 11-12, 2014) organized around the notion of archiving as a radical practice, including: archives of radical politics and practices; archives that are radical in form or function; moments or contexts in which archiving in itself becomes a radical act; and considerations of how archives can be active in the present, as well as documents of the past and scripts for the future. It was curated by 2013-14 A/P/A Institute Artists-in-Residence Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh.
The conference was organized around four threads of radical archival practice: Archive and Affect, or the embodied archive; Archiving Around Absence, or reading for the shadows; Archives and Ethics, or stealing from and for archives; and Archive as Constellation, or archive as method, medium, and interface.
Resources from the conference are available below.
Radical Archives website
The website is an online companion to the conference, organized around the notion of archiving as a radical practice. The site will soon feature contributions from conference participants, and also highlights curated papers and projects by other artists, archivists, activists and scholars working in the field. If you would like to contribute to the site, please check the contributor guide and email RA@radicalarchives.net for a username and password.
Photos and tweets using the #radarcs and #radicalarchives hashtags are continuously added to a Storify timeline at storify.com/ghanimariam/radical-archives.
Event program
The digital copy of the program contains panel abstracts and bios for all Radical Archives conference presenters.
Complete program: PDF (1.24 MB)
Schedule only: PDF (564 KB)
Audio recordings
Creative Time Reports, media partner for the conference, has released audio recordings of keynotes and selected panels, which you can find on their website.
creativetimereports.org/index.php?p=13778
Video recordings
Recordings of the conference are hosted at pad.ma, an online archive for densely text-annotated video material. The Radical Archives conference recordings can be found by following the link below. The videos can be filtered and sorted by theme or by presenter name.
pad.ma/grid/title/radical_archives
To view individual video recordings on this page, click the titles below. For complete scheduling and speaker details, refer to the event program or schedule.
Friday, April 11
Welcome by Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh
Keynote: Archiving a Revolution
Disrupting Standards, Remaking Interfaces
Collecting Resistance: Archivists in/of Movements
Radical Sampling: Archives Remixed and Remade
“Her Body is an Archive” Julie Tolentino’s “The Sky Remains the Same”
Performance: Joana Craveiro’s “Invisible Archives of Portuguese Dictatorship”
Inside the Black Boxes: Archives and Erasures
The Prison and the Archive
Collaborative Preservation Strategies: A Look into XFR STN
Saturday, April 12
Keynote: The Queer Art of the Counter Archive
The Queer Art of the Counter Archive
Diasporic/Decolonized Archives
Welcome by John Kuo Wei Tchen
Keynote: Archives and Ethics
Archives from Below
No Instructions for Assembly: Case Studies in Radical Archiving
Screening: There is Another History
Archiving Palestine: Perspectives on Loss, Recovery, Resistance, and Identity
Queering Archives
Spectral Archives
Performance: Jen Liu’s “The Monsanto Shadow Symposium
Lesbian Archives Roundtable
Wrap-Up Panel with Organizers, Keynote Speakers, and Advisors
Photos
To see more photos from the Radical Archives conference, visit our Facebook page.Thank you to all the presenters, participants, performers, organizers, and attendees who made the Radical Archives conference such a success!