NAC member Elliot Minogue-Stone reflects on Artist Archive Day, which took place at SDS on Friday 18 October 2024 as part of Artist Archive. All photography taken by Roswitha Chesher.
A call for audacious archiving
This is a reflection of the Artist Archive Day workshop, led by Annie Pui Ling Lok and Siobhan Davies. It is not a review or a description, but an ongoing and nurtured reflection of the ideas and methods shared in the workshop. Broadly speaking we were invited to delve into our personal archives, to ‘allow ourselves to remember’ and then were guided through a series of writing and moving tasks in response. But my reflection begins from a particular place…
Siobhan Davies opens the workshop with;
‘I have a digital archive, and I don’t like it.’
Siobhan Davies opens the workshop with; “I have a digital archive, and I don’t like it.”
She goes on to elaborate that the digital interface is not designed with the complexities of connection, influence and authorship in mind and so follows a formula, which in turn defines the content and display of the archive. ‘Name of work, artist, collaborators, year, photos, video, NEXT.’ The multifaceted nature of any creative process is lost in an attempt to fit it into a framework that doesn’t allow for its difference. I imagine this choice is made in aid of understandability, but perhaps we can house our work in a space that responds to idiosyncrasies instead of flattening them out. Maybe, in a medium as vital and ephemeral as dance, we could imagine a more flexible archive that allows the work to keep moving, rather than one that freezes it in time. This is what I’ve tried to do.
When I, a dancer and dance maker, think about my personal archive I imagine a physical space … Despite appearing solid it’s actually quite flexible. It’s been moving a lot in the last few years. Expanding actually.
When I, a dancer and dance maker, think about my personal archive I imagine a physical space. A room I can step into. With a door and windows, walls, ceilings and a rug. Normal room stuff. This space is a bit multi-purpose. It can be draughty, but I go there gladly. Despite appearing solid it’s actually quite flexible. It’s been moving a lot in the last few years. Expanding actually. I wonder where it will go, where it will expand to. And in that process, I wonder if anything will be let go. It is the beginning and ending of everything I make.
There’s music playing and I can never quite tell where it’s coming from. Like having many tabs open on a computer, there’s a lot of content. The content lives everywhere in this space, and in its many forms it shifts and merges. The content can be very concrete; it could be a dance or a performance (choreography from Kylie Minogue music videos, ballet and backwards rolls are plentiful here), but it could also be a thing (a red girls school bonnet or a lower leg stolen from an anatomy skeleton, neither belonging to me). The content can also appear as a theme or a vibe. ‘Kate Bush’ is a vibe. ‘Camp’ is a theme. ‘Funny’ is an essence.
This content is extremely flexible, it is the stuff that the archive is built around. The room is a container for this stuff, it holds it for better or worse and tries not to unconsciously forget it.
Some stuff is positioned in a way that appears helpful, it is organised and documented. There are lists and structures. Things are numbered and lettered and there are bullet points and things in bold. There is order here because it has, at some point, been shared. It has visited the ‘machine of comprehension’ sitting in the corner and begun a process to become a thing. It has left the safety of the archive to face the world of critical thinking, auditions, funding applications and audiences. It returns, clarified and polished, but in the archive it is allowed to appear looser and less defined.
On one side of the room is where most of the dance lives, it’s a zone that’s been refurbished recently, in commitment to my wish to be optimistic about dance. It is wide and deep. Sometimes I spend whole weeks here, hopping, practising and reminiscing as a retreat from the world. Conversely, it is also where I go to connect to the world. Large sections are reserved for my relationship to pleasure, connectivity, music, socialising, being seen and watching others.
There are problems here too, and the longer I stay the more I am reminded of this. Chronic underinvestment outside the archive leaves everything structurally fragile. But generally this is a place I am proud of. It is where I (re)connect to a very genuine version of self.
There are problems here too, and the longer I stay the more I am reminded of this. Chronic underinvestment outside the archive leaves everything structurally fragile.
Here the tangible and intangible weave themselves together. Costumes sit next to scores and tasks. Ideas float, some fully realised and practised, others remain relatively incomprehensible. The value of sense is different here, it is not the real world, so cerebral sense is not strictly necessary, body sense takes precedence here. From senseful to senseless these entities interact, a gesture manages to catch the thread of a particular sound or song, soon it’s wearing trainers, worn out from hours of dancing on concrete and grass. In this process of layering, these materials take on a new life and meanings begin to emerge.
Movements that matter appear as shadows on the wall. These movements are held in the archive for a variety of reasons. They might be a trick I spent hours practising (with greater or lesser success); pirouettes or something called a kip-up for example. They might be movements that feel good, or movements where I think I look good, or they might be movements I associate with particular people. I would love to exchange these with friends and family, to share what movements I link to them and hear what they associate with me.
There are ghosts haunting this archive. They have not been formally invited. They are here because they’re deeply ingrained in collective memory and I inherit this. I inherit this in the same way I inherit language and empire and smoked salmon bagels and gender.
The legacy of capital ‘D’ Dance lives here too. This is related to the Dance world, the realities of being a Dancer, and the politics of Dance making. The repercussions of certain people are remembered – positive and negative, provocative and nurturing. People are not labelled, there is little organisation. All that is held is my recollection, the comments, looks and touches that are hard to forget, for better or worse. So while there might be plenty of anguish, there is a great deal of resilience. The resilience is held in a large wooden chest. The closest thing I have to armour, to protect myself and my soft, fleshy body and spirit. Inside the chest, there are lots of resumes and lists. Some are real and factual, they live in the shadow of the machine of comprehension. Others like the resume of injuries, resume of rejections and the resume of things missed and plans uncompleted are more scattered.
There are ghosts haunting this archive. They have not been formally invited. They are here because they’re deeply ingrained in collective memory and I inherit this. I inherit this in the same way I inherit language and empire and smoked salmon bagels and gender. I did not ask for my inheritance but I try to acknowledge it and understand how it has benefitted me or not. Some of it I cherish. Some of it is deeply embarrassing. Or confusing. To complicate things, this inheritance is not always accurate. It is frequently misinterpreted and misassigned, and this mess of what is mine and not, brings the intricacy of ownership into my archive. I don’t think of myself as owning this archive, my role is custodial. Nonetheless I hold some responsibility for these ghosts and wish to tend to them appropriately. Due to the muddling of inherited memories, the value of truth and reality is distorted. All of this swirls and darts around the archive. Some of it is deeply impactful, other bits only play a contextual role.
So back to Siobhan and her archive. Perhaps I call for bravery; to allow for interpretation and transformation, to accept the falsehoods and the fakery. To let these sit alongside more ‘realistic’ documentations. Whether acknowledged or not, every archive is made through curatorial choices and I believe it’s a thoroughly artistic endeavour. So while I apologise to archivists everywhere for my bastardised interpretation, I wonder if there’s a way for these worlds to meet each other, so even if our archive is digital, we might like it.
Writing by Elliot Minogue-Stone. Commissioned by Siobhan Davies Studios.
Find Phobe on Instagram @elliot.minoguesto.
All photos from Roswitha Chesher.