Archiving the Future Symposium
The Association for Visual Arts (AVA) in Cape Town is excited to host a one-da symposium that delves into the realm of archival practice, digital archiving, and the future of archives, both historical and contemporary, within cultural institutions. This symposium will serve as a platform for collaboration, knowledge sharing, and exploration of the evolving landscape of archiving.
Friday, 8 December 2023
10 am-5 pm
AVA, 35 Church Street, City Centre, Cape Town
Programme
Introduction by Keely Shinners
10:30 am
Panel Discussion
11 am - 12 pm
With the Association for Visual Arts Archival Programme in full operation at the gallery, archivists and interns will discuss their individual and collective experiences in archiving the extensive organisational material of the association. The team will explore the documentative practices observed, the difficulties in sustaining a non-profit arts organisation, and the significance of the AVA as a support structure to emerging and established artists within the wider South African art ecosystem. The panellists will also discuss the importance of this digitisation project and what future engagements or art-based research may benefit from this accessibility.
Kim Gurney
12:30 pm - 1 pm
Writer, researcher and artist Kim Gurney will speak about her forthcoming book of creative non-fiction, Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive (iwalewabooks), which responds to half a century of paper records that comprise the AVA Archive, and follows long-term immersion in the same. In Flipside, Gurney follows the trail of particular archival artefacts, or documents of care, and where they lead to compose a polyvocal storyline interrupted by voices from the stacks. Its chapters move thematically through the rooms of the former house in which AVA resides, making deliberate connections between space and (re)imagination. Gurney will share her method, the book's narrative structure, and some key insights generated in the process.
Lunch break
1 - 2 pm
Kathryn Smith
2 pm - 2:30 pm
Visual artist, curator, and researcher Kathryn Smith presents on the project Fugitive, originally commissioned by the multi-year, interdisciplinary research project Biography of an Uncharted People spearheaded by LEAP at Stellenbosch University. The exhibition Charting the Uncharted was born from this project. Kathryn and fellow forensic artist and PhD candidate Pearl Mamathuba engaged with historian Karl Bergemann’s work on archival records describing the ‘fugitives’ or runaway enslaved or apprenticed people in the Cape Colony around the time of Emancipation, producing artistic interpretations of these individuals using the evidence of physical description from these sources, which is all that is left to validate the existence of these individuals. While many artists have engaged similar records in South Africa and the United States, an integral question that this project seeks to answer is, how do we begin to represent and reconstruct the personhood of individuals and communities whose stories our dominant historical narratives have silenced?
Rory Tsapayi
3 pm - 3:30 pm
Visual historian Rory Tsapayi’s research explores Italian studio photographer Ilo “the Pirate” Battigelli’s portraits of indigenous Tonga people in the Gwembe Valley along the Zambezi River between 1957-1960, when the Kariba Hydroelectric Dam was being constructed. Through his critical analysis of these colonial photographs and their afterlife in a museum archive, Tsapayi makes a call for speculative recontextualising through experimental representations and recaptioning that encourage alternative ways of understanding the historically neutralised hydrocolonisation of the Zambezi. This allows for a more textured and Afro-centric understanding of Tonga and Rhodesian history.
Seth Kriger
4 pm - 4:30 pm
Cultural worker and curator Seth Kriger offers a discursive analysis centred around his research on the tidal pools along the False Bay coastline in Cape Town. Kriger aims to reframe our understanding of what an archive can ’validly’ contain as he explores the ocean as a depository of memory which can be engaged with what he defines as an eco archive. Overflow: Towards and with an eco-archive does not stop short at redefining the functions of an ocean outside of its biological or geographical significance, but also begins to trace the socio-historical permeations that can be excavated from the mapping and spatial analysis of the tidal pools which speaks to the socio-geographical reality of apartheid constructions. What can be seen, felt, and heard in these alternative forms of archives that remains invisible in others?
Final discussion and closing remarks.
4:30 pm - 5 pm
The Archiving the Future symposium promises to be an enriching experience, featuring a diverse array of speakers who are actively engaged in the evolving field of archiving. We look forward to your active participation and fruitful discussions.
The event is free, but if you would like to attend RSVP below.