The Figure of the Archive: Research Seminar #3

The goal of this series 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.  

In this session we have two presentations by artists whose practice is engaged by questions of archival practice. Dr. Michele Masucci will address “Impossible Archives: Engaging shared memory work and the ethics of collecting witness accounts from self-organised social centres”. This will be followed by Jasion E. Bowman’s presentation on “Untitled (on a day unknown)” based on an overlooked 1936 court case where 29 men were tried as a group for homosexual crimes in England and which was the basis of a Whitworth Art Gallery  commission in 2016. 

Dr. Michele Masucci, is an artist, researcher and lecturer in writing and artistic research at the Royal Institute of Art. Masucci a PhD in Medical Science at Karolinska Institutet. 

Jason E. Bowman is an artist with a curatorial practice, a researcher, educator and writer. He is a senior lecturer in Fine Art at HDK-Valand Academy Art and Design. 

This event is part of a larger series and ongoing research strand on The Figure of the Archive.  

More about the presentations. 

(1) Impossible Archives: Engaging shared memory work and the ethics of collecting witness accounts from self-organised social centres 

Part of the research project Territories of Imagination departs from a longer history of collective self-organisation ranging from rural insurgencies such as the Republic of Maschito in1943 to autonomous social centres and underground cultural venues where political, social, and reproductive life are organised from below in moments of social autonomy. These formations, as also traced in practices of social centres and club cultures, operate not merely as sites of cultural production but as infrastructures of distribution, care, and collective survival, sustaining forms of life often excluded from majority culture. Within this context, the project develops a series of collective witness seminars with practitioners and participants, grounded in long-term collaborative relations. This practice raises implicit ethical questions shaped by conditions of mutual work: how such relations determine what can be said, recorded, or withheld without reproducing extractive logics. 

The project engages a set of problems already well articulated in archival theory. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault proposes that the archive should not be understood as a collection of documents, but as the system that determines what can be said at all, the conditions under which statements appear, circulate, and become legible as knowledge (Foucault 1972). In a different register, Jacques Derrida, in Archive Fever, insists on the archive’s relation to authority, law, and what he calls consignation: the ordering and gathering of traces under specific conditions of control (Derrida 1995). What both positions make clear, in different ways, is that the archive is never neutral. 

In Ariella Aïsha Azoulay recent scholarship the archive is distinctly situated within histories of imperial violence expressed as temporal regimes that disrupts the relational conditions from which photographs, documents and artefacts originate. In Potential History Azoulay argues that archival practices are inevitably tied to extraction, not only of objects, but of lives, relations, and worlds, and that any attempt to work with archives must also confront the need for refusal, for limits to documentation, and for forms of opacity and unlearning that cannot be fully absorbed into knowledge (Azoulay 2019). 

Rather than treating the situated practices and contexts Territories of Imagination engages as objects of documentation, the research departs from a shared problem: how organisation itself is collectively remembered. It asks how practices of assembly, maintenance, care, and conflict persist without stabilising into individual authorship or discrete events, and how authorship might be unlearned within collective production. At stake is not only how to document, but whether documentation itself risks reproducing the very logics of extraction, capture, and epistemic violence that these spaces resist. 

The project therefore approaches the witness seminar not as a tool for producing an archive in the conventional sense, but as a situated and negotiated practice of remembering. Here, the archive is refigured as a fragile, ongoing process. The archive as partial, relational, and contingent form where questions of safety, opacity, and consent remain central. What must remain unarchived, or only conditionally shared, becomes as significant as what is recorded, foregrounding the limits of knowledge as an ethical and political condition for sustaining collective life. 

(2) Untitled (on a day unknown) 
Via an illustrated presentation Jason E. Bowman will narrate his 2009-10 project Untitled (on a day unknown), originally commissioned by the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester and re-exhibited in 2016 at the Hasselblad Center and Kunsthal Aarhus in the research exhibition, Watched! Surveillance, Art and Photography in Europe after 2000. Bowman worked with Out in the City - a group of LGBTQ senior citizens - to exhume, reiterate and interpret the material culture of an overlooked 1936 court case of 29 men tried as a group for homosexual crimes in England. From multiple archival resources – newspaper reports, police and court records etc. – the trial, its mediation within popular press and its position in an anticipatory civic culture in the inter-war years (1918-1936) were re-traced. Via a performative reiteration of the trial, held in private in a courtroom archived in a police museum, a series of pinhole photographs and a suite of drawings, conducted from memory by a court artist, were produced and co-exhibited. Jason will discuss the relations between concepts and politics of archives and methods and practices of archiving as he describes processes of scavenging amidst a nebulous historiography to generate decisions on how to artistically articulate the queered archive as a site populated by ethical, aesthetic and mnemonical concerns.