Practices and Research in Living and Unfinished Archives is a 3 day workshop bringing together practitioners, researchers and students from different disciplines and institutions, around an interest in archival material. Based at MayDay Rooms in London, and working with political material from the collections (printed ephemera produced by political groups, collectives and post-1968 social movements organisations), the workshop aims to introduce participants to different creative approaches to research in the archive. Considering the archive not as ‘an inert museum of dead works’ but a living organism whose construction ‘must be seen as an on-going, never-completed project’, the workshop’s aim is to explore archiving and archival research as an unfinished and open-ended process.
Through the workshop, invited guests (artists, photographers, designers, writers, archivists and librarians) introduce participants to different ways to work with archival material across posters, pamphlets, newsletters, magazines, documents, formats and production processes that characterised this kind of publishing through history. Participants will engage in group discussions, collective research, speculation, and interpretation of documents part of the collections, and produce creative responses, with the opportunity of contributing content to a publication.
We’d like workshop participants to come from a range of different practice based disciplines including, art and design, illustration, graphics, photography and media. Undergraduate and postgraduate students from other disciplines but with an interest in radical politics and publishing, are also invited to apply to the workshop.
More details here