Materiality of the Archive

Sue Breakell is Archive Director and Principal Research Fellow at the University of Brighton Design Archives, UK. She was formerly head of Tate Archive, London and War Artists Archivist / Museum Archivist at IWM London. Her research bridges critical archive studies, twentieth century art and design history and material culture.Wendy Russell is an independent researcher and Special Collections Archivist at the British Film Institute, UK. She has formerly worked at the Archives and Special Collections Centre at the University of the Arts London, and as a freelance archivist. She was Secretary then Chair of the ARLIS/UK & Ireland Committee for Art and Design Archives (CADA) between 2011-2018.

• Part I - In the Archive: practices and encounters; 1. ‘Material evidences surviving in the form of writing’: materiality in archival theory and practice; 2 ’The true object of study’: the material body of the analogue archive; 3 Archival finding aids and perceptual frames: extending material contact points through Stephen Chaplin’s Slade School Archive Reader; 4 Archiving with scissors: materiality and cutting practices in photographic archives; Part II - With the archive: energy; 5 Valentine’s Jacket; 6 The archive as a site of making; 7 Applications of energy: a study of artists and entropy in the material; 8 Archival endings: erosion and erasure in the film archive; Part III About the Archive: Technologies; 9 The material archive everyday: technologies of the filing system; 10 The materialism of techno-archival memory; 11 Paper tensions: from flipbooks to scanners – the role of paper in moving image practices; 12 Expressing materiality in archival records; Part IV Beyond the archive: expanding the frame;13 Lost unities: the materiality of the migrated archives; 14 Fabrications: the quilt as archive;15 Performing gestures towards the archive: queer fragments and other ways of mattering; 16 ‘That’s special, we’ll keep that’: a conversation about counter archiving and socially engaged practice at Tate Exchange