MATERIALITY, EVIDENCE AND ARCHIVE WORKSHOP

This workshop explores the relationships between materiality, evidence and archive, terms that travel between the social sciences, science, law, history, art, archival science and other disciplinary arenas.

It is particularly concerned with documents, objects, and other types of material things that are located outside of official archival sites, and how such materials are retained, transformed, or reconfigured to perform the labour of evidence.

These practices are not a given but are constantly constructed and re-made in complex negotiation processes involving not only very different groups of actors, but also discourses, documentary procedures and archival modes of practice.

The workshop asks: How are these terms mobilized in the constitution of knowledge across disciplinary fields by curators, researchers, archivists, conservators and others, particularly those working outside of Euro-North American contexts?

The workshop also seeks to challenge and unsettle the established evidentiary forms and practices, and to share new ways of thinking ethnographically about the relationship between permanence, stability and objectification.