Protest

Ephemera

What is it and Why is it Important?

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• A huge amount of material is generated by protest movements, including signs, posters, pamphlets, as well as digital material.
• Preserving some of this material has the potential to provide unique insight into events, beliefs and culture of a given point in time and to counterbalance dominant narratives in news coverage.
• Preservation and organization of this ephemera is important for creating/maintaining cultural memory, both for the larger culture and also within specific political/activist movements so that their images, language etc. are not lost/subsumed by more dominant narratives

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Archiving Challenges and Solutions

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Challenges:

• Amount of material generated makes it difficult to decide what should be preserved and who should be tasked with making those decisions
• Challenges arising from inconsistent formats (mix of digital and physical, varying size and shape of physical objects)
• Difficult to know how to organize preserved material so it can be accessed in a useful way?
• Risk of material accumulating and left unprocessed in a memory institution, becoming a “hidden collection”
• How to deal with tensions arising from institutions having power to shape narratives.

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Solutions:

• Rapid Response Collecting with plan for how the collection will be organized/used
• Maintenance of special collections devoted to specific movements such as University of Michigan’s Labadie Collection
• Community archiving/independent archives with narrower focus
• Organizational schema that meets the needs of specific audience
• Openness to experimenting with new archiving/organizational ideas (eg. Occupy Wall Street Archives)

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Human Rights Ephemera

What is it and Why is it Important?

Human rights ephemera includes oral and written testimony, photographs, and footage from survivors in the immediate aftermath of political violence (genocide, mass incarceration, forced migration, disappearances, etc)

Qualified as ephemera because they subvert dominant narratives of history (and are therefore more vulnerable to co-optation and manipulation/destruction) and based on their reliance on digital spaces and storage and lack of resources to maintain these resources/archival materials

Establish and disseminate survivors’ stories and to hold perpetrators accountable (via official reporting, personal archive, documentary film, art installations, etc)

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Above: Still from The Silence of Others (2018) a film about Franco’s regime in Spain

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Left: Cover of Michelle Caswell’s Archiving the Unspeakable

Archiving Challenges and Solutions

Challenges:

Emphasis on lived experience (qualitative vs quantitative documents)

Ties between institutional archives and perpetrating regimes

Digital preservation resources

Solutions:

Technology enabling survivors to create personal digital archives

Participatory model between archival institutions and survivor communities (?)

The Center for Human Rights Documentation & Research –web-based archives through Archive-It

Radical Information Project, WITNESS (Video4Change Network), Tuol Sleng Mugshot projects, Interference Archive (and countless other community/activist/art-based participatory archives)

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Above: screenshot from WITNESS’ digital documentation handbook

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Right: List of institutions collecting human rights ephemera and implementing participatory models

ORAL HISTORY

What Is It and Why Is It Important?

What: Oral history is the oldest type of historical inquiry. It collects memories and personal commentaries through recorded interviews, which can be multidimensional and multiformat

Why: To record primary sources as evidence for understanding, connection and knowledge, either communal, historical or anthropological

How: Oral history has two core components that need to be considered: 1.) Conducting and recording, and 2. ) Organizing, cataloging and archiving.

For this work, there is not a standardized approach or metadata schema. Only best practices.

Some of the most common schemas include: Dublin Core, DACS, MARC, LCSH, MODS, and EAD

Archiving Challenges and Solutions

Key challenge

Oral history is both created and cared for by a broad and diverse set of people and practitioners. So, how projects are planned, collected, cataloged, archived, made accessible and maintained vary greatly.

Potential solutions

Not another standard or metadata schema. It’s local. Practitioners need to pick and choose from best practices based on the needs and resources of the community and organization.

Performance Art

What is it and Why is it Important?

Performance Art is the medium in which an artist or a group of artist’s present a live performance to an audience. Within the medium of performance art, there is emphasis on it’s time-based and ephemeral nature.

In contrast with other mediums of art most Performance art lacks an object that describes its physical state in its entirety, resulting in a challenging relationship to documentation and history.

As an event, each time a performance is performed it results in a different expression of a work according to the.

When discussing Performance art, Art already has difficult time placing itself within a historical narrative, and the unique challenges of performance work result in fundamental difficulties in access and experience.

Dan Graham, Performer/Audience/Mirror 1975. Photo from Whitney Museum of American Art

Archiving Challenges and Solutions

KEY CHALLENGES (Theoretical):

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Accepting the possibility of loss or lack of Information, leaning into the ephemeral.

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The body serves as a prosthesis for memory, able to “assure the possibility of memorization, or repetition, of reproduction, or of re-impression.”

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• Linda Caruso Haviland

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Archiving Challenges and Solutions

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Specific widespread solutions like video documentation and choreographed reenactments result in more challenges and require an acceptance of some loss of information in a way that allows for future access and interpretation of meaning.

• Documentation Challenges: Relationship of creator to work, understanding of documentation as part not whole.
• Reenactment Challenges: Artist intent and potential salinization of political narratives within memory institutions.

KEY CHALLENGES AND POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS (Practical):

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What happens when the Artist shares responsibility for the archive?

• D-ark Metadata Schema
• Ralph Lemons Work and Writing
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References

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LINK TO GROUP SIX BIBLIOGRAPHY