Exposition

the archive that i imagine to unlearn the archive (last edited: 2024)

Melina Scheuermann
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open exposition

About this exposition

This exhibition emerged from my artistic research residency Performing/Archiving ‘Object Lesson’ which I realized in January and February of 2024 in Porto. I departed from the proposal to take up archival documents of my study within the history of education as performative scores and triggers for artistic engagement. In particular, I studied two picture book series of the pedagogical object lesson method (Pt. lições de coisas, Germ. Anschauungsunterricht) that circulated across Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The picture books are traversed by several intersecting discriminations based, amongst others, on gender, race, sex and class. Through the artistic engagement I reflected on the epistemological, political and ethical implications of archiving and the writing of history and developed an artistic-archival methodology that includes performative, visual, visual-material and textual modes of research. This methodology aims to promote situated, embodied and affective knowledges and is inscribed into feminist and decolonial struggles. The archive that i imagine to unlearn the archive is an exhibition of the artistic interventions produced as much as the structure of an archive. The exhibition/archive serves as a platform for upcoming workshops that I will promote to practice the artistic-archival methodology that I developed in a collective setting. I borrow the concept of unlearning from decolonial and postcolonial theory where it is discussed as a practice that challenges the value-based, hegemonic apparatus of knowledge production from the inside. There is a slight irony, seemingly a paradox in name of this archive: The archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive. Unlearning something while repeating, practicing, constructing it? The idea is not repetition, unless it is always considered repetition in variance and in motion, never settled, never fixed. Its name speaks to my attempt to unlearn archiving and archival research while being implied and meshed within.
typeresearch exposition
keywordsarchive, anarchive, performance, historiography, arts-based research, arts education
date09/01/2024
last modified03/05/2024
statusin progress
share statuspublic
copyrightMelina Scheuermann
licenseAll rights reserved
languageEnglish
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2475565/2482446


Simple Media

id name copyright license
2577864 turning around,showing VIDEO Melina Scheuermann All rights reserved
2701228 Performing/Archiving 'Object Lessons' / instapost final presentation Melina Scheuermann/Ana Leite All rights reserved
2701261 Performing/Archiving 'Object Lessons' / flyer workshop Melina Scheuermann All rights reserved
2712909 turning around, showing IMAGE Melina Scheuermann All rights reserved

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