The Figure of the Archive: Research Seminar

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.  

The word figure enfolds multiple meanings - as a verb: to appear, be mentioned, represent, be a symbol of, imagine, pat-tern, calculate, understand, determine, consider - all remultiplied by the word’s hospitality to prefixes. Almost as complex… is the word ‘archive’ (the noun), which plays (is played) as idea, as institution, accumulation of physical or virtual objects, profession, process, service. Conjoining chese words ‘figure’ and ‘archive’ is to open up a cornucopia of meaning. (“Introduction” C. Hamilton et al. REFIGURING the ARCHIVE, Capetown: New Africa Books. 2002.) 

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:   

• Decolonizing the Archive 

• “Instituting from archives: Asociación de Arte Útil and TEOR/éTica in conversation”  

• Indigenous Archives Collective  

• “Another Mapping of Art and Politics. The Archive Policies of Red Conceptualismos del Sur” 

In this online workshop we will explore the reasons for this ascendancy of the figure of the archive, the different ways in which it has been experimentally re-constructed, and the wider contexts of current archival impulses across contemporary artistic practice and research.   

15:00-15:30 Prof. Mick Wilson: Introduction
15:25-16:00 Monika Gabriela Dorniak  
16:00-16:10 Short break 
16:10-16:45 Dr. Fiona Hallinan 
16:45-16:55 Short break 
16:55-17:55 Prof. Jyoti Mistery
17:55-18:00 Closing discussion and advance information ion next seminar in the series  

In taking the imaginary as an object of analysis, the term figure becomes a key term. Figure 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, and 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 contemporary cultural practice, one that arguably has achieved a certain hyper-currency since the 1970s and especially from the 1990s onward in artistic discourse.  Adina Arvatu in “Spectres of Freud: The Figure of the Archive in Derrida and Foucault”, citing Pierre Nora 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 series 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 “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhucene: Donna Haraway in conversation with Martha Kenney” (2023), where she described how: “Figuring” as “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 the introduction to the (2022) open access volume Figure: Concept and Method the editors 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” 

Monday, 2 March 2026, 15:00–18:00
PhD Seminar Room, Vasagatan 50, Gothenburg, and via Zoom

Participation is free. Booking required (Book Here). No ECTS credits will be awarded. Certificate of attendance can be issued if requested. 

Places provided on a first come / first served basis.