Talk presented by Louise Curham at the Australian Society of Archivists 40th annual conference, ‘Archives on the Edge’, Hobart, 20 August 2015 in Session 17, The Creative Perspective. The talk was based on the article ‘Reaching Through to the Object: Reenacting Malcolm Le Grice’s Horror Film 1’, (Ihlein & Curham, 2015), based on the Ihlein Curham collaborative project Teaching and Learning Cinema.
Welcome and thank you. The abstract promised two of us, myself and Dr Lucas Ihlein, artist and media arts lecturer, at the University of Wollongong. Lucas unfortunately had to be in Canada on family duties and to present research at another conference.
Here’s a statement of purpose – our aim with this talk is to put forward ideas that we think are relevant to the archival community that have emerged from our work with live art from the past. Our work involves a remaking process or ‘re-enactment’. In short this re-making process involves using existing archives and generating new ones. We try to get as close as we can to the original work. And yet as we ‘reach through’ to it, we find we must make changes to it because the conditions we find ourselves in are different from those when the work was originally created. This process sheds light on the original work, and the changes we make are subtle forms of new knowledge about it. It’s the generation of new knowledge in this process that we have come to think of as a kind of tending. Buried in ‘tending’ is an idea about ways to appropriately contribute to the record of the past and it’s this idea that is probably what is most relevant to you as archivists. And I’ve been hearing this as a bit of a theme in the conference. (more…)
louisecurham.net 