What Stays – Archiving Care is a year-long residency project exploring digital counter-archives and the role of technology in opening up alternative histories and memories. The project launched with an open call for three digital residencies for international artists of any discipline. The residents were selected by jury members Helen Pritchard, Oulimata Gueye, Clara Herrmann, Markus Huber, and Nora O Murchú.

Resident

Aditya Surya Taruna aka Kasimyn:

JOGET-X

In JOGET-X (A Speculative Archive of Alternate Histories of Indonesian Dance Music), Aditya Surya Taruna explores the diversity of Gamelan music to construct a speculative archive of Indonesian dance music. The project asks; what if colonisation did not affect how music, technology and dance has developed?

Resident

Romi Ron Morrison:

Noticing The Preconditions For ___________.

Noticing The Preconditions For ___________. is an experiment in durational correspondence between artists Romi Ron Morrison and Mimi Ọnụọha. In this project, noticing takes an archival form, as an index of passing moments of care each artist notices in their daily lives.

Resident

Lo-Def Film Factory:

The Subterranean Imprint Archive

The Subterranean Imprint Archive is a project by Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson (Lo-Def Film Factory) in collaboration with Joe-Yves Salankang Sa-Ngo. It is an ongoing research project that traces the legacy of extractive technologies in Central and Southern Africa.

Archiving Care Event - Transforming Archives

Tue, 13 July 2021, 19:00
What Stays – Archiving Care
Discussion
Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz

How and what a society remembers has become a key question at a time when self-perceptions are being re-negotiated and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are being questioned. This shows in a new presence of the archive in contemporary art. The artistic memory work positions itself against current examples of historical oblivion and a disturbing surge of revisionism through the strengthening of nationalistic and racist historical narratives. At the same time, it argues in favour of long-overdue strategies for decolonising and diversifying bodies of knowledge and ranges of experience. The memory of humanity, analogous to the memory of nature itself, becomes a question that is crucial for survival. Cultural diversity as a resource of social and sustainable living has become a fundamental issue for shaping the future. This makes accumulated memory institutions and archives the focus of critical reflection as well. As a manifestation of power, they are called into question in their production of a canon.

The event was hosted by the JUNGE AKADEMIE as part of the year-long programme of What Stays – Archiving Care, a collaborative project between transmediale, the JUNGE AKADEMIE of Akademie der Künste, Berlin and the Goethe-Institut Slovakia. The discussion was part of an exhibition and weekly event series by the Akademie der Künste on the topic Memory Work – Transforming Archives .

Unrendered facts event documentation

Thu, 19 Aug 2021, 20:30–23:00
Unrendered facts
Performance, Screenings
Haus der Kulturen der Welt

Counter narratives performed out loud in a hotel room, the rendering of psychogeographies that an algorithm cannot find and a celebration at the end of the world. Bringing together films and a performance, out of doors Thursday programme explored how alternative histories, narratives and stories open up possibilities for refusal.

In her film, Unrendered Road (2020, 23 mins.), Tali Liberman questions knowledge systems such as Google Maps and the political realities they create. In Cemile Sahin‘s new essay film Bad People, Bad News (2021, 40 mins.), three Kurdish women meet in a presidential suite to celebrate the death of Saddam Hussein and Sonja Khalecallon, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos’ Drag Queen and chaotic High Femme, sings and tells tales of the retro-future from her establishment: Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel.

out of doors’s Thursday event was part of the year-long programme of What Stays – Archiving Care, a collaborative project between transmediale, the JUNGE AKADEMIE of Akademie der Künste, Berlin and the Goethe-Institut Slovakia. Taking place across HKW’s Westgarten and the garden at silent green, transmediale’s out of doors brought together film, music, performance and talks that engaged with the aesthetics and politics of refusal. Featuring an international lineup of artists, writers, and filmmakers: Arjuna Neuman + Denise Ferreira da Silva, Bárbara Wagner + Benjamin de Burca, Bassam Al Sabah, Cemile Sahin, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Diane Edwards, Dylan Kerr, Frank Sweeney, Jennifer Mehigan, Nazanin Noori, p. staff, Salvatore Arancio, Tali Liberman and Haig Aivazian.

Archiving Care Symposium

Find the full documentation of the online symposium on the Goethe-Institut Slowakei YouTube channel.

Fri, 26 Nov 2021, 16:00 - 20:40
Archiving Care Symposium
Online Event

Speakers: Dušan Barok, Agata Cieślak & Asia Tsisar, Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak (Pirate Care), Bojana Piškur, Jaro Varga, Arseny Zhilyaev

As Boris Groys says, history occurs in a space between the archive and life, between the past that is being collected and the reality, understood as everything that has not been collected. Together we will explore this space between. The symposium will take a look at different contexts, cracks, how our presence is formed and then as accumulation, the archiving of different types of knowledge shapes its current narratives. We will also examine what has not been collected and archived. How can we look for the missing pieces of history in the cracks that shape our reality and presence. History follows a formal logic where the past, present and future are not thought of psychologically, not historically in the classical sense of the word, not existentially, but in a purely formal way, from the point of view of archival inclusion and exclusion. We will explore the forms and tools of archiving, care, interventions, we can approach our local histories in various contexts and constantly re-evaluate what is excluded and what is not, and how we can create scenarios for possible more inclusive futures.

Programme (detailed programme description here):

Dušan Barok - Matryoshka Intelligence: Archive, Database, Blockchain
Bojana Piškur - Southern Constellations: Poetics of the Non-Aligned - ways of researching, curating, archiving and working together
Arseny Zhilyaev - Museum in Russian Cosmism
Agata Cieśliak & Asia Tsisar - Creating the alternative: Secondary Archive
Jaro Varga - Challenging the library
Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak (Pirate Care) - The Disobedient Practices of Care and the Technopolitics of Digital Custodianship

Curated & moderated by Peter Sit

The event was hosted by the Goethe-Institut Slovakia as part of the year-long programme of What Stays – Archiving Care, a collaborative project between transmediale, the JUNGE AKADEMIE of Akademie der Künste, Berlin and the Goethe-Institut Slovakia.