The Figure of the Archive: Research Seminar

The focus is on the archival as research construct in current artistic research and related areas.  

Presenters include current and recently completed PhDs working on archival issues from UniArts Stockholm, Sweden; University of Lille, France; and others. The goal of the event is to consider the figure of the archive as it functions in a range of current artistic research projects and the different political readings of this figure within these research undertakings. (1) 

The archive has been a central figure and pre-occupation over several decades for both the organizational infrastructure and the practical production of contemporary art. Indeed, it might be argued that the archive has become the enabling and the limiting horizon of many cultural practices. It often seems that all forms of collection, all forms of memory work, and all forms of programme are only conceivable through some appeal to the figure of the archive. Even the desire for alternative cultural politics, including decolonized and counter hegemonic practices, seem to predicate themselves on alternative archival models and archiving otherwise. 

See for example:  

• https://www.decolonisingthearchive.com/  

• https://dpe.tools/resources/instituting-from-archives  

In this online workshop we will explore the reasons for this ascendancy of the figure of archive, the different ways in which it has been experimentally re-constructed, and the wider contexts of current archival impulses across contemporary art. The session will also promote the sharing of bibliographies and practical exemplars by currnet and recnty comoleted doctoral researchers. 

Adina Arvatu has noted that the “figure of the archive has immense cultural and methodological significance in what we, in our posthuman(ist) age, still call ‘humanities’: Foucault and Derrida … contributed largely to this significance. They thematized the ‘archive’ (in the singular) and endowed it with an unmistakable (yet often misunderstood) figurality.” (*) In this research seminar we focus not on the humanities per se but rather we consider some of the different ways in which the archive functions as a figure within specific artistic research projects. In approaching the archive as a figure, we are drawing upon a wide range of recent approaches to figuration, such as that outlined by Donna Haraway in a recent interview where she described how: 

“Figuring is a way of thinking or cogitating or meditating or hanging out with ideas. I’m interested in how figures help us avoid the deadly fantasy of the literal. Of course, the literal is another trope, but we’re going to hold the literal still for a minute, as the trope of no trope. Figures help us avoid the fantasy of ‘the one true meaning’. They are simultaneously visual and narrative as well as mathematical. They are very sensual.” (**) In this seminar four researchers working across film, art, and craft traditions will present the different ways in which the archive is a figure that is operative within their current work. Based on these four examples we will then try to identify some of the ‘sensual’, ideational and affective affordances of ‘the figure of the archive’ as a construct used within artistic research processes. 

*Adina Arvatu “Spectres of Freud: The Figure of the Archive in Derrida and Foucault”, citing Pierre Nora, general editor’s introduction’ to Les lieux de memoire.) 

** Martha Kenney and Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhucene: Donna Haraway in conversation with Martha Kenney”, M+ Magazine, 2023. URL: https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/magazine/donna-haraway-critique-anthropocene-capitalocene/, accessed 8/6/2025. 

This event is intended for PhD students primarily, with some places for masters students. This seminar is also a session within the doctoral level course “Theoretical Constructs in Artistic Research”.

Contributors include Marc Johnson, PhD researcher Film and Media, SKH, Stockholm, Sweden; Fiona Hallinan, PhD researcher, LUCA School of Arts, KU Leuven, Belgium; Dr. Karl Logge, independent researcher, Sant’Antioco, Italy; and Dr. Arash Deghani, Postdoctoral Researcher, CEAC - Center for the Study of Contemporary Arts, Univeristy of Lille, France. Schedule will be posted 18 August 2025.

Please register to attend online via this link.

15:00  Welcome and introduction: Introduction to the figure of the archive and different ways in which the idea of the archive has functioned in recent cultural practice.
15:15 Mark Johnson, PhD Researcher
15:45 Dr. Arash Deghani
16:15 break
16:45 Dr. Karl Logge
17:15 Closing discussion and sharing of references. Notice the second seminar in the series in Spring 2026.
18:00 End

(1) In taking the imaginary as an object of analysis or as a process for study, “figure” is a construct that is used to indicate the clustering of a set of images, narrative elements, motifs and constellations of idea/image/story fragments that while not settling into the categorical fixity of a concept, nonetheless operate as a recognizably consistent element – with multiple variants- across texts, sites, utterances…. “Figure” is a term originally produced within rhetorical analysis, however, it has evolved with psychoanalytical and other ways of thinking about meaning making in the 20th C.   

The archive is a potent “figure” in the contemporary imaginary, one that arguably has achieved a certain hyper-currency since the 1970s and especially from the 1990s onward in cultural practice and discourse.  

1. “The figure of the archive has immense cultural and methodological significance in what we, in our posthuman(ist) age, still call “humanities:’ Foucault and Derrida -whether considered independently of each other, or together, as I am trying to do here-contributed largely to this significance. They thematized the “archive” (in thesingular) and endowed it with an unmistakable (yet often misunderstood) figurality. Granted, their “archives” do not quite cut the same figure. Nor would that beinteresting, if that were the case” 

“Succinctly put, Nora’s point is that at the same time that history as a discipline became more critical of its archival practices, society as a whole was seized by anarchival frenzy bordering on compulsive hoarding.” 

Adina Arvatu ”Spectres of Freud: The Figure of the Archive in Derrida and Foucault”, citing Pierre Nora, general editor’s introduction’ to Les lieux de memoire 

2. “Figuring is a way of thinking or cogitating or meditating or hanging out with ideas. I’m interested in how figures help us avoid the deadly fantasy of the literal. Of course, the literal is another trope, but we’re going to hold the literal still for a minute, as the trope of no trope. Figures help us avoid the fantasy of ‘the one true meaning’. They are simultaneously visual and narrative as well as mathematical. They are very sensual.” 
(Donna Haraway in interview) 

3. “We aim to address how figures, figuring and configuration provide a way to study complex, contemporary problems and processes that require interdisciplinary approaches. We outline how individual contributions make use of figures, figuring and configuration. We demonstrate what is at stake in the analysis of figures, the practice of figuring, and the compositions of configuration.”  

“Long into the medieval period, figura signified ways of knowing that connected signs to material and historical life. ” 

“Although Auerbach did not intend his methods to be either sociological or political, thinking with figures has accompanied a variety of approaches in the social sciences, the humanities and political practice. For example, Georg Simmel’s sociology used the figures of the stranger, the poor and the adventurer to illustrate a more general condition, whereby “each person is called to realize his own, his very own prototype”
(From the intro to the volume Figure: Concept and Method)