1st Edition
The Materiality of the Archive Creative Practice in Context
The Materiality of the Archive is the first volume to bring together a range of methodological approaches to the materiality of archives, as a framework for their engagement, analysis and interpretation.
Focusing on the archives of creative practices, the book reaches between and across existing bodies of knowledge in this field, including material culture, art history and literary studies, unified by an interest in archives as material deposits and aggregations, in both analogue and digital forms, as well as the material encounter. Connecting a breadth of disciplinary interests in the archive with expanding discourses in materiality, contributors address the potential of a material engagement to animate archival content. Analysing the systems, processes and actions that constitute the shapes, forms and structures in which individual archival objects accumulate, and the underpinnings which may hold them in place as an archival body, the book considers ways in which the inexorable move to the digital affects traditional theories of the physical archival object. It also considers how stewardship practices such as description and metadata creation can accommodate these changes.
The Materiality of the Archive unifies theory and practice and brings together professional and academic perspectives. The book is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students working in the fields of archive studies, museology, art history and material culture.
Part I
In the Archive: practices and encounters
1 ‘Material evidences surviving in the form of writing’: materiality in archival theory and practice
Alexandrina Buchanan
2 ’The true object of study’: the material body of the analogue archive
Sue Breakell
3 Archival finding aids and perceptual frames: extending material contact points through Stephen Chaplin’s Slade School Archive Reader
Liz Bruchet
4 Archiving with scissors: materiality and cutting practices in photographic archives
Costanza Caraffa
Part II
With the archive: energy
5 Valentine’s Jacket
Maryanne Dever
6 The archive as a site of making
Peter Lester
7 Applications of energy: a study of artists and entropy in the material
Lisa Cianci
8 Archival endings: erosion and erasure in the film archive
Elodie A. Roy
Part III
About the Archive: Technologies
9 The material archive everyday: technologies of the filing system
Sarah Cain
10 The materialism of techno-archival memory
Wolfgang Ernst
11 Paper tensions: from flipbooks to scanners – the role of paper in moving image practices
Amanda Egbe
12 Expressing materiality in archival records
Athanasios Velios
Part IV
Beyond the archive: expanding the frame
13 Lost unities: the materiality of the migrated archives
James Lowry and Forget Chaterera-Zambuko
14 Fabrications: the quilt as archive
Claire Smith
15 Performing gestures towards the archive: queer fragments and other ways of mattering
Ben Cranfield
16 ‘That’s special, we’ll keep that’: a conversation about counter archiving and socially engaged practice at Tate Exchange
Sarah Haylett, Lucy Bayley, Cara Courage, Julia LePla, Pip Laurenson, Hélia Marçal and Kit Webb
Biography
Sue Breakell is Archive Director and Principal Research Fellow at the University of Brighton Design Archives, UK. She was formerly head of Tate Archive, London and War Artists Archivist / Museum Archivist at IWM London. Her research bridges critical archive studies, twentieth century art and design history and material culture.
Wendy Russell is an independent researcher and Special Collections Archivist at the British Film Institute, UK. She has formerly worked at the Archives and Special Collections Centre at the University of the Arts London, and as a freelance archivist. She was Secretary then Chair of the ARLIS/UK & Ireland Committee for Art and Design Archives (CADA) between 2011-2018.
