VISU-member prof. Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans will present at the conference Formats of (Non)Seeing in Split on 27 October, 2022.
The conference is hosted by the Institute of Art History.
Abstract of the lecture
The recent emergence of grass-roots photographic archives in Eastern Europe offers new avenues for an understanding of photography’s role in knowledge production. In the era of digital commons, grass-roots archives differ from state owned archives in that their users are often no longer distinguishable from their sentries. As Jussi Parikka (2012) and others argued, digital archives become seemingly borderless and fluid, not limited to any physical space and – often – not restricted in use. Writing about this new archival tendency, Ariella Azoulay noted that the public’ right to the archive is no longer “external to it but rather an essential part of it” (Azoulay 2017). Digital and participatory archives thus undermine the elementary tenets of archival theory which hold that archived documents are stored and kept away for a controlled retrieval as historical evidence. At the same time, these new archival formats and practices are “deeply political spaces” (Beer 2013). Their power might be dispersed and decentralized, but it still resides in the archives (Parikka 2012).
The aim of this paper is to consider the ways in which grass-roots archiving practices in Eastern Europe are formative for our understanding of the historical, vernacular photography of the communist era. Looking at three bottom-up initiatives in Hungary, Poland and Ukraine, I will consider their archival practices as tools for knowledge production. These grass-roots initiatives took different approaches to archiving vernacular photographs, which in turn led to divergent results. Drawing on Azoulay’s theory, I will argue that they facilitate the shift towards the understanding of photography as an event. At the same time, they bring with themselves a host of new, less salient rules and habits, which will inevitably lead to distinct forms of knowledge of photographic histories.
Place
The conference takes place from 27 until 29 October, 2022, at the conference hall at the Cornaro hotel in Split (Croatia).
More information on the complete program, here.