Active Archives: Performing Social Realities in Archival Contexts

“How do archives perform social realities? What practices activate archival materials? And how can archival activisms push against the dominant forms of narrative production and knowledge transmission that shape social and political discourse? Moving across artistic and curatorial research practices, the opening program introduces a range of performance-based archival methodologies that work through voice, (mis)translation, the dialogic, audio registration and sonic-scape as they experiment with how storytelling can happen otherwise. The contributors each approach the relation between archive and society as a two-fold set of ongoing negotiations: between activation and activism, and between making public and making publics. Weaving their performative propositions through particular archival histories, they rehearse what it means to ‘do’ archive work today.”

Active Archives was a program conceived in conversation with Stefan Aue and Lama El Khatib, which Hoetger curated for the opening night of The Whole Life. Archives and Imaginaries at the House of World Cultures, Berlin. The event brought together four artistic and curatorial practices that take up performative entry points into archive work, or the work of the archival, and the contested social realities such work has the potential to recall, reframe, reproach, rewrite, reconfigure, and reattune.