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Seminar: Archiving

The practice of archiving is to preserve material generated by individual/s, community, organizations, institutions, and that which is deemed by archivists to have long-term value. Through practices of appraising, selecting, describing, and making useable and accessible archival materials the archive enacts and reproduces values; the archive has never been a neutral place. This seminar, which took place during The Shape of a Practice, asked how we could reflect and expand these values to value more matters and materials, and thus work towards equity and social justice: how can we move from the archive (as an institution) to archiving as a practice that sustains many lives (like oral history, dancing, singing, cooking)?

In this recording reflecting on a week of seminar sessions during The Shape of a Practice, moderators Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski and Tahani Nadim facilitated a discussion alongside the participants of their seminar, Archiving. Drawing on key issues of archiving, they explored how each of their chosen case studies was developed through various concepts of the archive—such as oral history, dancing, singing and cooking—and in this way works toward equity and social justice. October 31, 2020. Recorded at HKW, Berlin.
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Between 2013-2022 the Anthropocene Curriculum was developed by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW, Berlin) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG, Berlin), in collaboration with many partners worldwide. The website archive is now maintained by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology.