The Whole Life Academy @HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt)

Workshops: Archival Burnout in the Age of Vulnerability: [Disobedient] Commons and their Dilemmas, Speculations, Emotions

With Özge Çelikaslan, Naz Cuguoğlu

Humankind lives in the catastrophic moments of a historical rebellion: “The Earth is rebelling against the world, and the agents of planet Earth are floods, fires, and most of all critters” (Franco “Bifo” Berardi). How can the age of vulnerability be envisioned: as the end of human history or by embracing and caring for each other? In this workshop, participants will visit archive commons who exist as temporary autonomous zones to create spaces for studying together. They will discuss and think together about their materiality in the context of collectivity, connectivity, transversality but also in the sense of isolation and extinction.

Guests: Pelin Tan, Dagmar Brunow from Bildwechsel; Niki Trautwein from Lili Elbe Archive - Inter, Trans, Queer History; Markus Ruff from Arsenal Living Archive, and Mela Dávila Freire.

Workshop Dates: October 9, November 13, January 8, January 15, February 5.

For more information about the workshops, guests, and reading materials, please click here.

Map: Archive Commons, Alliances, Feelings by Özge Çelikaslan and Naz Cuguoglu

An open-source, collaborative map for creating archival alliances. We invite guests to add on archival practices that they know, hear, or participate in.

We identify “commoning the archive” as a disobedient, decolonized, autonomous, subversive, and rogue practice. Hereby, we can approach this practice as a collective mnemonic practice involving the communities to participate in the memory-making processes as opposed to the state-led construction of history. Via the map of archive commons, the audience can access these archives. The map includes and involves Do-it-yourself archives, activist archives, participatory community archives, anarchives, autonomous archives, disobedient archives, feminist and queer archives and so on, they all function as different forms of non-institutional archives dedicated to archive all kinds of data, objects, memories, oral histories, human experiences, feelings, emotions and affect for human rights activism, social justice, commons' struggle, subculture, empowerment, visibility, collectivity and so on.

To access the map, click here.

From the workshop discussion emerges an open-source, collaborative diary for creating archival alliances. To access The Diary – Collective Notes on Archives of Commons, click here.

More information about The Whole Life Academy:

The current situation of global social and political unrest is strongly connected to archival practices. In recording, storing and sharing lived experience, data and knowledge, the present is captured within a constellation of complex historical and contemporary social choreographies and sensual protocols. The Whole Life Academy Berlin rehearses collaborative forms of knowledge production in archives, taking up urgent questions on decolonizing archives and objects and unfolding marginalized narrations.

What strategies of commoning, collectivity and solidarity can archives offer in the face of health, economic, natural and political crises? How can local narratives, archival objects and biographies contained within archives be made legible today? How do current human and non-human relations shape the ways in which archives are built and function?

Embedded in an international long-term research process, the Academy in April 2021 continuously develops a nomadic curriculum offering a week-long local program with excursions, seminars and archival viewings. In 10 different workshops connecting theory, practice and on-site research, locations such as the Computerspielemuseum, the Harun Farocki Institute, the personal archive of Veronika Radulovic, the Lili-Elbe-Archiv, the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and the archive of the Schwules Museum are taken as the premise from which participants will reformulate an understanding of contemporary and historical practices of collecting, gathering and distancing and test alternative forms of access to archival material using both analogue and digital tools.

With guest contributions by Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann, Doreen Mende, Adam Jasper, Anna-Sophie Springer, Florian Wüst and Vadim Zakharov, among others.

The Academy will be accompanied by a public evening program of lectures, talks, and screenings and will be followed by a congress at HKW from April 22–24, 2021.

The first edition of The Whole Life Academy took place in Dresden in May 2019.