Ascolta

Afterimages and Haptic Archives of Grief

While the relationship between photography and grief is well-trodden territory, this seminar explores a concept that realigns them in novel ways: the afterimage. Placing it in dialogue with Black feminist theory and feminist theories of visual culture, we will consider how the afterimage shifts our understanding of photography as a haptic archive connecting the living and the dead. The discussion will focus on how contemporary Black artists create subtle and compelling afterimages that allow us to relate differently not only to personal grief, but also to the collective forms of loss and grievance that increasingly shape our unsettling present.

Tina Campt (Princeton University), senior visiting fellow at the A.S.CENT. Center, will lead a graduate-style discussion of selected texts on photographic temporality, synaesthesia, loss, the index, and the opacity of grief.

 

Translating the Archive

Archives are filled with objects, and objects can themselves function as archives. Yet our engagement with them, and with the discursive structures that enable or restrict access, always involves acts of translation.

In this participatory workshop, PhD students and early-career researchers are invited to present an archival object, collection, or archive that raises questions about how materials can be translated within research and for different audiences, including academics, artists, and the broader public.

How do archives challenge our understanding of what can, or should, be preserved? How might different disciplinary perspectives offer new insights into archival objects and the contexts from which they emerge? And how can alternative practices of archiving open up new possibilities for sustaining futurity?

Further information about the events can be found in the attached leaflets.

Leaflet seminar 23rd June

Leaflet workshop 24th June