Practices on Collective De/Archiving

Archives and Archiving are becoming vital practices during the contemporary crisis as not only organizing the data and knowledge but also providing future discourses on the production of knowledge and institutions. As a modernist institutional tradition, archiving has potentialities for diverse institutional practices and as well as self-organized non-institutional entities. How we can think about an “archive” as a fluid, entangled, and an open entity that leads us freely to connect the existing materials but prompts at the same time critical discourses? How to construct an inter-media based narrative of an archive that may exist with several forms of the medium from photographs to documents and ect.? How to create an archive that reveals a collective memory that is potentially active for the future? How to transform an archive to an exhibition; what is the curatorial strategy of it? How Dearchiving become archives too?

This workshop will try to provide answers to such questions and as well as support to ongoing archive. The workshop will be structured through several layers: Archive as materials, Archive as discourses, Archive as Collectivity, Archive as exhibitions.

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Pelin Tan is a sociologist and art historian from Turkey. She is the 6th recipient of the Keith Haring Art & Activism award (New York) and senior researcher of the center for arts, design and social research (Boston). Tan was a Postdoctoral fellow on “Artistic Research” at ACT Program, MIT (2011), a PhD researcher of DAAD – Art History, Humboldt Berlin (2006). She was a research fellow of The Japan Foundation (2011), Hong Kong Design Trust (2016), BAK Utrecht (2017-18). Tan was visiting professors at Nuernberg Art Academy (2008), TU Berlin ArtHisotry &Architecture (2006-07), School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University (2016), Architecture Faculty, Nicosia, Cyprus (2018). Between 2013 – 2017, Tan was Associate Prof. and Vice-Dean of the Architecture Faculty of Mardin Artuklu University. She co-directed three episodes of films titled 2084; about the future of art and society with artist Anton Vidokle. Member of Artikisler Collective.Currently, she is visiting at Bard College in the Center for Curatorial Studies and Human Rights Dept. (New York, 2020).

Tan recently curated the Gardentopia project of Matera ECC 2019, Italy, and “De-Archiving Dwelling” of I-DEA Archives of Archive (2019-20). She is on the curatorial board of Internationale Bauausstellung 2027, Stuttgart (2019 – 2027). Tan is a co-curator of an exhibition at MAAt Lisbon (2021).

She is a lead author of ‘Towards an Urban Society’, the International Panel on Social Progress (Cambridge Publ. 2018), Climates: Architecture and The Planetary Imaginary (Columbia Univ., 2017), The Silent University: Toward-Transversal Pedagogy (Sternberg Press, 2016), Swamp and Other Imaginaries (MIT Press&Sternberg Press, 2020), Autonomous Archiving (Istanbul, 2017) and many others.