Archival Echoes • EXC 2020 Temporal Communities

A transdisciplinary workshop in collaboration with the 90x collective

The workshop took place on 24 and 25 February at the Freie Universität Berlin and included project presentations, discussions, an artist talk with the 90x collective and impulse talks by Zaal Andronikashvili (ZfL Berlin), Lindsey Drury (EXC 2020), Emese Kürti (Artpool 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.

Workshop: "Archival Echoes" / © Thoma Sukhashvili

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 do image, text, and sound in concert echo across the media, across affectively intense fragments of history, across lived experience and (missed) encounter?

Archival Echoes was the second workshop held in cooperation with the Georgian 90x collective – a collective of four Georgian artists primarily working with photography. Ithas brought the artists from the collective into discourse with researchers from Eastern European Studies and Art History. The workshop explored the archive as cultural practice between memorisation and erasure and its relation to the photographic image.

Lindsey Drury and Sima Ehrentraut / © Thoma Sukhashvili

Each of the four involved artists from the collective approaches the topic of Archival Echo in a different way in their individual works.

Giorgi Rodionov, Thoma Sukhashvili, Nino-Ana Samkharadze and Mano Svanidze engage in the archive as practice, a material entity, and a re-appropriated tool of artistic intervention. In discussing the entangled histories and the formal and narrative potentials of the photographic image, the collective emphasised questions of self-archivisation, the interconnection between intimacy and governmental control and the reverberation of the collective experiences of disruption in the archiving image.

Exhibition: "Post Post: Queer Caucasus" / © Giorgi Rodionov

On the second day of the workshop, the group of participants visited the exhibition "Post Post: Queer Caucasus" at the Berlin-based Institute for Endotic Research. In addition to a guided tour by the curator, the participants got the chance to enter into discussion with Benjamin Busch, one member of the curatorial team at this artists-run exhibition space in Berlin Neukölln. The excursion provided 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.