Love and work, love is work

I ended my busy week at a great workshop at the Warburg Institute yesterday, titled ‘Love and Work: Materialising creative approaches to archives’. The five speakers each had brilliant, imaginative responses to the provocation they were given. The second part of the workshop was interactive and invited us all to discuss questions around the joyful/fraught labour that archives demand of its visitors. Affective experiences that accompany archival work, whether that’s a researcher’s, artist’s, writer’s or archivist’s work, can raise unexpected or unacknowledged challenges. We talked about access, feelings, silences, consent, memory, resources, responsibility, and among many other things. It was very interesting to discuss archives with people from many different professional backgrounds. Many attendees worked with material from the twentieth century, making my experience somewhat of an outlier. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed hearing about everyoe’s work and left with many new insights.

Many thanks to organisers Laura Guy, Naomi Pearce and Ed Webb-Ingall for such a wonderful, inspiring workshop!