Saturday 19th June 2021 | 11:00 - 16:30 | Zoom

Before you can animate an archive, you need to secure its location and make it accessible. And then, location and modes of access affect how the archive can be animated. This one-day symposium looks at the ways grassroots organisations, artists and curators have been in dialogue with archivists and library staff as they seek to preserve, provide access to, and animate their archives. The title “Challenging Archives” refers to both the challenges that these archives bring, and the challenges to archival convention that they provoke.

Focusing on collections based in London, two round-tables reveal the often hidden stories of how these archives have been relocated, digitised, and made accessible, from collecting policies, to negotiations about cultural value through to artistic interventions. The archives that are explored include: the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive at Birkbeck, The Feminist Library, The Bishopsgate Institute, MayDay Rooms, and the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths. These archives share urgencies around making materials secure, accessible and also making them known to an audience beyond specialist researchers. The roles of archivists, library managers, researchers, volunteers, artists, curators and activists all intersect in the stories of how these archives have taken their current shape and form.

The symposium is divided in two round-tables, which have overlapping focal points around the ways in which these particular case studies can talk to us about the politics of animating archives, and the work of preservation, relocation and cataloguing that takes place alongside.

Round-table one: The Politics of Preserving

This round table will think about the collecting strategies of the Bishopsgate Institute, The Feminist Library and grassroots collections within institutions.

Round-table two: The Politics of Opening up Access

This roundtable will think about digital, collaborative and interventional strategies of groups using archives, with contributions from Lauren Craig of X Marks the Spot, Barby Asante, the Women's Art Library and Mayday Rooms.

Image caption: The Feminist Library on the move, 2019.