Learning from ‘Gift Science Archive’

In 2021, Networks of Care offered a platform at the nGbK, Berlin⁠⁠(opens in a new tab)⁠ enabling an exchange of ideas and information between practitioners and experts concerning strategies for dealing with artistic estates, private and public archives, or idle documentation volumes. As curator for the project Gift Science Archive⁠⁠(opens in a new tab)⁠, Hoetger joined Networks of Care for an online conversation entitled “Preserving Artists’ Legacies through Collaborative Archival Practices” together with Gift Science Archive collaborator Amalia Calderón, as well as Mark Waugh, Co-Artistic Director of the UK charity Art360 Foundation⁠⁠(opens in a new tab)⁠, and Vivian van Saaze, Associate Professor of Conservation and Museum Studies at Maastricht University/Maastricht Centre for Arts and Culture, Conservation and Heritage. The group discussed the potential of collaborative archival practices, as well as the challenges of sharing responsibilities.

Following the conversation, Hoetger contributed a text to the platform’s culminating publication, edited by Anna Schäffler, Friederike Schäfer, and Nanne Buurman. Along with the other contributors, she reflected—through theoretical analyses and also partly fleeting or historical thoughts, notes, and reflections and through their polyphony and contradictoriness—on the ways in which practices of preserving and discarding are always also political and must be understood principally as unfinished processes of continuous selecting, deciding, translating, transferring, actualizing, and transforming.