Approaches to What?
Reading Bodies Reading Archives
Research Presentation 20.07.2016 19:00
With Michael Jevon Demps, Laura Genevieve Jones, Del Hardin Hoyle, Anya Yermakova
collaborator The Institute for Endotic Research
How do archives contain the intangible?
Do archives reference the body towards the spiritual?
How is the “third world difference” produced to create colonial discourses?
Could it be interesting to share this archive with the countries and cultures it is based upon?
How is information disseminated?
Where are the black women writers?
How does the intangible content of the archive relate to its tangible counterpart?
How can we share and communicate the journey of going from tangible to intangible (or the other way around) to the other?
Given the colonial history of Berlin (and Germany in general), how does the archive (the amassing of books and other informative objects) contribute to the reconciliation of systemic destruction of knowledges bases (i.e. book burning during the Third Reich)?
How does the archive reify/challenge the idea of how a book functions?
The archive is a site of knowledge and power, what are the best ways to implement these without perpetuating coloniality?
What gestures of care does the archive produce?
How can the archive make the human body in it feel – like a historical site – a sense of oneness with other materials?
What is a book that could live in an archive? What is a book that could not?
How can we subtract the weight of the ink in a book?
What is the negative space of the archive (that builds a story)?
This research presentation is part of The Institute for Endotic Research: Reading Bodies. Module #3 of AFFECT Program of Collaborative Artistic Practices in Berlin.
A series of interventions in three different archives rehearsing with the possibilities of the library as a “place for encounters”: encounter of new reading materials; as a content display through its spatial design and the library as a social space, where the readers place the body to read and to share what they gather.
theinstituteforendoticresearch.org
projects.agoracollective.org/affect