Encounters in the Archive

Introduction

With this issue we aim to reconsider ways that artists and researchers have rethought, reimagined and reworked histories and experiences in their encounters with materials in archival repositories. The dialogic exchange between researchers and artists and, artists as researchers affords opportunities for experimentation across disciplines towards decolonial approaches and methods that make it necessary to highlight the iterative process of “re” – processes that invite a constant return to the archive. As Jacques Derrida has described the return to the archive is “compulsive and repetitive” as ways to “open to the future.” Developing from the practices and scholarship of theorists (Saidiya Hartman, Mark Sealy and Temi Odumuso) who encourage assemblage and polyphonic practices within archival research, we will facilitate conversations between scholars, practitioners and artists who address relations and tensions between dominant and elided histories. Rather than simply replacing the dominant narrative with counter narratives, this issue will activate latent experiences and make counter narratives visible as touch points between prevailing hegemonic discourses and revised histories and experiences. By revitalizing archival sources drawn from various perspectives and disciplines this issue seeks to identify decolonial strategies in art practices that use archival sources as “return to commencement” (Derrida). The content of this PARSE issue will be garnered from a series of seminars and roundtable discussions with a focus on dialogic encounters and exchanges on artistic practices and projects and, scholarship that reflects on research strategies that destabilizes power in the archive. PARSE invites artists and scholars working with archive sources to describe and reflect on methods used to challenge institutional structures of power ascribed through archives. Inaugural Seminar:  Autumn 2024