W/ri/gh/ting Archives through Artistic Research

This collaborative artistic-research project, dedicated to working in/with archives, recognizes imperial and colonial violence underlying conventional archival practices and reflects on the possibility of transforming this violence into something generative. The projects core operational strategy converges two motivations: (1) the conceptualization of archives as relational entities, and (2) the recognition of the epistemological shift towards practicing research as art. Methodologically, the project of w/ri/ghing archives is defined by two intersecting agendas, described by Eve Tuck and C. Ree in their A Glossary of Haunting: of righting the wrongs, which expresses a call for ethics and justice in archive-based research, and of writing the wrongs, which investigates possible modes of representation and narration for archival research. Along this proposal, the project practices and negotiates artistic-research methods of archival research; it aims to continuously update its methodology on the basis of the knowledge generated through its methods, outcomes, and collaborations, and, through this, it also plans to foster a network of artists and institutions researching, theorizing on, and performing arts-based archival research. Within this methodological framework, the project will employ a few methods, concentrated within its Cartography, the knowledge repository and web-based platform, which, together with its design, coding, launch, and updates, will function as a research journal and a space where the artistic- research production is performed, documented, and discussed. This includes Co_Labs, a three- part laboratory that hosts collaborative artistic-research practices by inviting researching artists and institutions to do critical work towards the projects projected outcomes (exhibition, book publication, workshop), as well as Net_Works, a web-based residency program that invites specific positions in sound art, writing, and community-building work to critically engage with and contaminate the intended course of action. The projects originality lies in its critical attention towards the relationship between conducting artistic research dedicated to archives and performing the work of archiving in artistic ways, both of which derive from queer studies, decolonial studies, applied human rights, and critical archival studies. It proposes a process-oriented approach that involves collaboratively practicing and theorizing on artistic-research methods with the aim of building a sustainable Vienna-based network of artists and institutions working with archives. A key element for the above is technology, employed not only as a tool that enhances the projects accessibility, but also, more importantly, as a format of artistic research and an alternative modality of collaboration. The project is co-led by two researching artists and curators, engaging with archives individually and collaboratively. Morusiewicz designs and employs artistic-research methods of queering archives through layering text and film footage with ephemeral and autobiographical. Maggessi approaches archives through an intimate and collaborative artistic practice that employs reproduction-based analogue techniques. Together, they investigate how the intertwining of their positions may generatively complicate issues of representation, narration, medium, and materiality.

The core purpose of the collaborative artistic-research project "W/ri/gh/ting Archives through Artistic Research" (2022-2026) was to explore the research-based processes and artistic outcomes that can result from investigating the convergence of artistic-research practice with both archival research and the practice of archiving. With this goal in mind, the project was structured into three thematic strands: (1) personal archives, which focused on exploring what the project conceptualized as "archives-in-becoming," (2) queer/embodied archives, which investigated into the specificities of non-heteronormative collections and ways of collecting, with the focus on the body, as a key element of such collections, and (3) resistant archives, which were defined as institutional and private collections that express a political intention of resistance and/or are resistant to being archived for the reasons of their participants' safety, of their criticism of state-national agendas, of their own invisibility or silencing. This division was reflected in the project's structure, with every theme being in focus for at least a year under the frame of a "collaborative laboratory" ("Co_Lab"): a sequence of collaborations with a pre-selected team of artists, researchers, and representatives of each Co_Lab's collaborating institution, leading to a sequence of outcomes. These outcomes, in turn, were further critically and artistically engaged with in the context of "Net_Works": web-based residencies hosting individual artists, asked to "remix" the contents of the generated outcomes through the media of their choice. The purpose behind this sequencing of the project's building blocks was to analyze the creative artistic-research processes leading to the artistic-research outcomes, and, in this way, to reflect on how they can be employed again and again without necessarily ending with the presentational formats of their outcomes (exhibition, artist book, workshop). This attention to process was captured by the project's methodological premise: since knowledge production happens in a non-linear and dynamic way, the research activity that it involves, together with the messily overlapping ways through which it is navigated, need to be adjusted accordingly. With this in mind, the project's team followed the strategy of "queer zigzagging," an operational mode of moving through the project's chronologically sequenced segments blurring the otherwise clear-cut division into what is process and what is outcome.