Call for abstracts: re / dis / ordering // vernacular archives as dynamic social agents and social performances of memory

At the core of this peer-reviewed issue is the question of how to analyze memory objects in a way that preserves and amplifies their performative dimension. We are particularly interested in contributions that deal with objects kept within so-called vernacular archives as sites for non-institutionally mediated transfers of memory. For re / dis / ordering we invite text proposals that inquire upon which new perspectives can be opened by an analysis founded on empirical methodologies concerning social performances of memory. Our aim is to show how the notion of performance and the act of situating oneself can expand the discourse of how archival memory objects are read and analyzed as embedded in social structures as a way of resisting pre-existing narratives of interpretation. Methodologies include but are not limited to appropriation, re-enactment, intervention, re-collection, displacement, re-ordering, expanding, de-archiving, fictionalizing, silencing, deleting and, overwriting, while the question posed is that of where and how does a specific method situate the artist/researcher and how are different media represented as dynamic social agents?

We invite contributions with a strong interdisciplinary focus, coming from fields and disciplines such as artistic research, material memory studies, media anthropology, design theory and cultural studies, among others.

Possible perspectives to be explored in the contributions are, among others:

- Analyzing the operational specificities of different inscription media found in vernacular archives. What are the media anthropological implications of looking towards a media specific performativity of the archive? How do different media perform differently in constituting narratives within contexts of intergenerational memory transfer?

- Perspectives focused on living archives as the place of articulation of embodied experience with historical narratives and the employment of performative archival practices.

- Following trajectories of archival material: discussions on new case studies, theories and methods on traveling concepts and things through the lenses of processes of displacement such as migration and flight.

- Archiving the gaps and writing about the invisible: How does violence manifest in archives and in bodies, as omission, fractured narratives, or gaps within memory itself? How does it appear in the archive through subtle performances, diffracted, broken and fleeting appearances between the very material and the mundane?

Please send us your proposals (max. 500 words plus references) and a short biography (max. 150 words) to insertdisorder@gmail.com until August 4, 2025.

 

About the publication

INSERT. Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries is an open access publication platform seeking to bring together artistic, scientific and curatorial practices in the frame of culture analytical research. It grasps art as a potential space for critique both in an analytical and transformative sense. The individual thematic issues of INSERT gather contributions that pursue questions related to the extent to which self-reflexive, aesthetic practices are capable of analyzing cultural constructions, their politics and modes of operation.

INSERT was developed in 2020/21 by Sigrid Adorf, Noëmie Stähli and Julia Wolf at the Research Focus Cultural Analysis in the Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts in the frame of the SNF research project „“ Insert Citation. Artistic-Scientific Analyses of Cultural Processes of Transmission. The issues (usually two per year) are dedicated to different thematic focuses under the responsibility of alternating editors.

Link to INSERT: https://insert.art/

Guest Editors

The peer-reviewed INSERT issue #10 re / dis / ordering is guest edited by Ana de Almeida (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna/ Austrian Academy of Sciences), Lena Ditte Nissen (University of Art and Design Linz/ Austrian Academy of Sciences), and Elif Süsler-Rohringer (University of Applied Arts Vienna/ Austrian Academy of Sciences).