ARCHIVAL PRACTICE
The Shape of an Archive
Clodagh Assata Boyce
This archive will trace the historical production of contemporary art made in collaboration with Kunstverein Aughrim. This container reflects the institution's role in supporting artistic practice and records the process and outcomes of their activities. However, the documentation generated during processes of conceptualisation, production and activation of exhibitions has a historical value that reaches beyond mere administration. It seeks, instead, to contribute to memory and support critical thinking in the future.
This archive is fundamentally technical. It describes, classifies, conserves, attends to researchers and facilitates a variety of actions related to administrating, coordinating, preserving and giving access to documents.
Those who archive determine what events are historicised. Documentation preserved for the future forms the basis of studying the past. Therefore, we must ask: how we can represent the political ambitions of contemporary artistic practices in Ireland most faithfully? When classifying, can we strive to create categories that challenge universalist notions? Can we promise an archive that is plural in it's ideas and authorship? Such a project forces us to confront the power relations we might produce. Within any archive, memory is reified and shaped by it's institutional context.
A radical reformation of the traditional archive requires us to unite our practice and theory. To guarantee a standardised operation of the system, the archive should produce a manual of clear and precise procedures that regulate the different processes of the management of documentation. This manual should include: recommendations on organising and classifiying documents, what documentation is necessary to provide the archive, a timeframe for their provision, and instructions on how might it be recovered later.
However, bringing the traditional practice of archiving under scrutiny challenges its principles, both conceptual and technical. This allows us to renegotiate the boundaries of the art institution. Further, it can take us beyond a critical analysis of the Kunstverein's greater impact by intervening in the less visible gears of the institutional machinery. This project has the opportunity to rewrite power relations produced by the traditional archive. Success here will require adopting a relational practice of distribution. Such a practice requires institutional reliability and a willingness to negotiate archival practice with relevant publics .
In this making of an archive we can consider how it might be possible to account for artistic processes in a careful, complex, fragile, and partial, yet productive way. These considerations allow challenges to the fundamental principles of objecthood, collection, and physical proximity standard in archival practice. Our intervention allows transformed understandings of what it is for an institution to have or make shape an archive.
Clodagh Assata Boyce is a cultural practitioner based in Dublin. Influenced by Black feminist praxis, their curatorial and artistic projects challenge extractive logics by turning towards opacity and interdependence as strategies of resistance. Their practice spans film programming, performance, writing, commissioning, exhibition-making and archival work. Clodagh's curatorial work has been featured at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, PS² Belfast and Outburst Queer Arts Festival. They have presented work at FILET London and Contemporary Irish Arts Centre Los Angeles. Clodagh has recently developed projects with Studio Museum in Harlem and Kunstverein Aughrim.
Kunstverein’s collaboration with Clodagh Assata Boyce is supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.