“Whether it’s summer or winter, you freeze. Your hands grow stiff as you try to decipher the document, and every touch of its parchment or rag paper stains your fingers with cold dust. The writing, no matter how meticulous, how regular, is barely legible to untrained eyes. It sits before you on the reading room table, most often a worn-out looking bundle tied together with a cloth ribbon, its corners eaten away by time and rodents. It is precious (infinitely so) and damaged; you handle it cautiously out of fear that a slight tear could become definitive. You can tell at a glance whether a bundle has been opened even once since it was first stored. An intact bundle is easily recognizable. Not only by its level of deterioration—after all, it may have been subjected to damp cellars and floods, wars and disasters, frosts and fires—but by a uniform layer of stiff dust that cannot be blown or brushed off, a scaly hide hardened by the years. Gently, you begin undoing the cloth ribbon the corsets it around the waist, revealing a pale line where the cloth had rested for so long.”

Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 1-2.

You cannot help but consider the physicality of the archive. How your body must engage with the materials and the space where you encounter the collection.

Materials and notes, Carleton College Archives, Gould Library, Northfield, MN

“Research . . . means first and foremost understanding meanings, discovering shortcuts, making connections, and detecting systems, which is why the physical handling of the archive itself—actually touching materials, papers, parchments, and feeling their many forms—as well as writing about it by hand constitute its core content, while also providing the key with which to unlock it.”

Susanne Bieri, “Introduction,” in The Dynamic Library, (Chicago: Soberscove Press, 2015), p. 59.

This haptic reading of the archive opens up numerous avenues of engagement for the user. You bring your own path(s) to your investigation.

A box of materials from Wayne Dyck’s personal archive, consisting of photographs and films made while on the job as a foreman for Bertram Drilling.

“The significance of tactile looking . . . is that it is more act than reading; it produces more than it understands.”

Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 3.

A selection from Wayne Dyck’s personal archive, consisting of photographs and films made while on the job as a foreman for Bertram Drilling.

“Archives . . . are not only places of storage, they are also places of classification production, where systems of organization are devised. They are places where society and culture meet, and where the private becomes public, or at least the private encounters the public, and vice versa.”

Susanne Bieri, “Introduction,” in The Dynamic Library, (Chicago: Soberscove Press, 2015), p. 61.

What if the archive remembered you? What if it kept a record of your use of the archive as a site of “play?” How can the systems of organizing the archive nurture these serendipitous and associative ways of looking?

Renée Green, “Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae,” in The Archive, Charles Merewether, ed. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006).

“The historian’s approach is similar to a prowler’s; searching for what is buried away in the archives, looking for the trail of a person or event, while remaining attentive to that which has fled, which has going missing, which is noticeable by its absence.”

Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 71.

Archives both remember and forget. Authority is inherent in their structure. What can those gaps tell us about how culture and society account for their past and project their aspirations for the future? Whose voices are left out in that process?

We invite Christina and Frank Lyon to contribute their ideas about archival investigations. They are generously hosting the “Archive Stories” talk on April 7th within the context of their exhibition at Company Projects.

OUECHA is the experimental organization of wife and husband Christina and Frank Lyon based in the Twin Cities. The name emerged by way of misunderstanding and became a mnemonic for their interdisciplinary practice of affinities: a reminder to begin from perspective, patience, openness, and resolve in a conversation that simultaneously prioritizes internal listening and drive with the richness of freshly discovered questions about and through a great otherness. Such is a recipe for change and the willingness to be changed—a neutral handshake with indeterminacy, a baffling hug between meaning and its awkward scaffolding, a pirouette that greets its new and different visions with interest, kindness, and care.

Rogue Curatorial Energy

Is it the right time to ask, what is an institution? We do know it is the right time to ask, “What is an archive?” Our current project, Playtime, emerges from a decentralized practice oscillating between the institutional and the personal archive among the material culture of estate sales: death and material culture as institutions, style as the personal.  

All that makes an archive an archive is institutional support, but with such an excess of material culture in these times you can find archivists everywhere: we are all rogue curators.

Estate sales behave a bit like a surprise archive, often unorganized but nonetheless housed within an institution (the home) where the codes set forth by the systems in place tend to dominate the way it is in most archive buildings. It is here that we must employ our most ferocious creativity—What to glean from a life, from a collection? How to present an assemblage from “rubble?”

The archives among us are raw materials ripe for reassembly, inspiration, and possible answers.  We can defamiliarize the contents of the archives to produce new pathways and a diffusion of subjectivity, power, and institutional biases. We can sew fresh and integral goals and narratives, or revel in goalessness and and nonlinear sensations of meaning.

Questions for a Porous Archive

Is it possible to change the archive’s form without changing its content?

When was the last time you queried an archive?

What does your personal archive say about you?

What can archives do that language and narrative cannot?

How to ventilate the archive?

How to live with archives in an “idiorrhythmic” fashion, honoring the “fugitivity of the code” implicit in centralized archives?

How does the internet scramble our concepts of precious-cizing the archive?