Organized by Lindsey Drury, Research Area 5, "Building Digital Communities", and Sima Ehrentraut, Research Area 2, "Travelling Matters"

Echo is a trope, a figure of sound and movement. Thinking through the echo in the context of visual representation shifts the focus to constellations of spatial reverberation, travelling images and recurring memories. How do images bounce back or turn, to return? How does image, text, and sound in concert echo across the media, across affectively intense fragments of history, across lived experience and (missed) encounter? 

The transdisciplinary workshop Archival Echoes discusses the art works developed in the context of the Cluster project Visual Echoes. The project, which is located within the Transfer Area of the Cluster, pursues a close cooperation with artistic approaches. It aims to explore echo as a figure of intermedial communication and fragmentation, with a special focus on the interrelatedness of visualization and narrativization and the effects of resonance in processes of image-based narration and historicization.

Archival Echoes is the second workshop held in cooperation with the Georgian 90x collective – a collective of four Georgian artists primarily working with photography. It brings the artists from the collective into discourse with researchers from Eastern European Studies and Art History who address the archive in (post-)Soviet contexts. The workshop explores the archive as cultural practice between memorization and erasure and its relation to the photographic image.

Each of the four involved artists approaches the topic of Archival Echo in a different way in their individual works. The archive appears as a practice, a material entity, and a re-appropriated tool of artistic intervention. Interconnected in their exploration of entangled histories and investigations of the formal and narrative potentials of the photographic image the projects engage in questions of self-archivization, the interconnection between intimacy and governmental control, and the reverberation of the collective experiences of disruption in the archiving image. Employing different aspects of archival practices Giorgi Rodionov, Thoma Sukhashvili, Nino-Ana Samkharadze and Mano Svanidze provide a multifocal image of the echoing histories that haunt their photography, stories and objects.

The workshop will take place on February 24/25 at the Freie Universität Berlin and will include project presentations, discussions, an artist talk with the 90x collective and impulse talks by Zaal Andronikashvili (Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin), Lindsey Drury, Emese Kürti (Artopool Art Research Center, Budapest), and Lukas Schmutzer (Universität Wien) on the archive as discontinuous institution in (post-)Soviet contexts and on artistic strategies to disrupt, re-write the archive and allow it to (dis)appear. On February 25 the group of participants will visit the exhibition “Post Post: Queer Caucasus” at the Berlin-based The Institute for Endotic Research. In addition to a guided tour by the curator, the excursion will provide space to transfer the topics discussed during the workshop to a broader context and to collectively reflect on Documenting Queerness in the setting of the Queer interventions presented in the exhibition.

Programme

Online //

Conference Room, Cluster “Temporal Communities” Otto-von-Simson-Str. 15, 14195 Berlin

10 am | Introduction – Sima Ehrentraut

10.15 am | Impulse Talk – Lindsey Drury

11 am-12.30 pm | Presentation 90x collective

12.30 pm-2 pm |  Lunch Break

2 pm | Impulse Talk – Lukas Schmutzer (Universität Wien)

2.45 pm | Impulse Talk – Zaal Andronikashvili (ZfL Berlin)

3.45 pm | Artist Talk Archival Intimacies moderated by Lindsey Drury and Sima Ehrentraut

4.30 pm | Impulse Talk – Emese Kürti (Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest)

5 pm | Final Remarks

 The Institute for Endotic Research, Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin

2 pm-6 pm | Visit to the exhibition “Post Post Caucasus” at the Berlin-based Institute for Endotic Research (TIER)

Guided Tour by curator Giorgi Rodionov

Discussion on Documenting Queerness with the curator of the exhibiton Giorgi Rodionov and Benjamin Busch from The Institute for Endotic Research