Accumulation
Project coordinators: Lindsey Drury, Sima Ehrentraut, Karina Rocktäschel, Samira Spatzek, and Nina Tolksdorf
Collect, scatter, select, appropriate, annihilate, revive, re-contextualize, distort, neutralise, bury
The archive as a complex of power and knowledge — of collecting, listing, and categorising — remains a problematic component of historiographic practices and cultures of memory.
Scholarly, artistic, and activist engagements with the archive have centred the nexus of institutions, memory, and processes of normativisation in their critical work with and about archives. Such work has shown that archives are not places of neutral recording and preservation of cultural goods, but rather reflect hegemonic and class-based generation of cultural values: they are machines of canonisation as much as they are places of distribution of feelings and of belonging.
How, then, do we deal with the archive, which, as a site and epistemological practice, is so closely linked to the surrounding social order and is always also a site of the institution of power? The hybrid project "After Accumulation" aimed to connect to these existing debates to explore the archive as an institutionalised actor of historiographical practice and a metaphor for cultural tradition.
After Accumulation organised a reading and discussion group as well as various workshops in collaboration with institutions and individuals in Berlin, and invited Julia Lübbecke as the Clusters Dorothea-Schlegel-Artist in Residence with her project “Welcome to the Dirty Archive” (as link: further details).
For a final reflection After Accumulation collaborated with the artist Maxine Vajt, who designed and conceptualised this website that assembles photos, notes, and residues from the closing workshops in 2023. The website has a partly interactive set-up that aims to capture the material and digital traces After Accumulation has produced for its time being and to transfer the ambivalence of archiving and the compromised accessibility and visibilities that come with the practices of selecting, collecting and publishing into a digital space. The blurred layout draws attention to paradox to archive the outcomes of a project that was set up to critique and move beyond this very practice.
The project group and its activities were financed by the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities” (Freie Universität Berlin) in collaboration with CRC 1171 “Affective Societies” (Freie Universtität Berlin).
For more information on the project, please visit:
https://www.temporal-communities.de/explore/listen-read-watch/after-accumulation