Archival Materials, Practices, Politics and Poetics
Workshop with Hyun Jin Cho and Nina Hoechtl
16 October 5-7pm
@ Women's Art Library/Make
Free to attend RSVP
The VBKOE (Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs – Austrian Artists Association of Women) archive contains a sizable amount of mixed materials – such as letter correspondences, funding applications, day-to-day records as well as prints and works realised by women artists – since its foundation in 1910. This archive reflects a changing history from the latter days of imperialism to the fall of the Habsburg Empire and WWI, Austro-Fascism and the Nazi Era through to the progressive movements in the arts in Austria then to the expansion of the European Union and the current austerity cuts in public funding.
This workshop will be based on our participation in the VBKOE archive and hopes to extend the discussion to the archival politics more broadly. The archival politics, in our minds, points to the entangled relations between the politics and materials. Therefore, we would like to touch on the basic questions regarding any archive – as a site to bring in the past, present and future all together in a non-linear timeline: why some things have become part of the archive initially, and how meaning is being engendered over time.
How do the politics and ideologies play a role in the archive's becoming? How do archives and (self-)history writing manifest themselves physically and spatially? What form does an archive take to allow appropriations, poetics, reevaluation and changes? How can a critical self-examination be set in motion? How can the public be involved in the processes of the archive? We would like to discuss these questions through the lens of a feminist and Boal methodology.
Hyun Jin Cho & Nina Hoechtl are both artists and have made collaborative works; they also have been involved with archiving work in different contexts. Hyun Jin Cho worked previously as the archivist for the film distribution company Artificial Eye. Nina Hoechtl is a board member of VBKOE since the beginning of 2012 and has been tasked with the VBKOE archive.
In the course of the project THE MANY ARCHIVES! (22 September – 7 October) by Nina Hoechtl & Julia Wieger (at the Austrian Artists Association of Women, VBKOE www.vbkoe.org) Hyun Jin Cho joined in the officially designated role of an outsider to reflect the events via filming and writing.
