What Stays – Archiving Care
Challenging records, reclaiming narratives, or writing differences into public accounts, requires defiance, imagination, and the bringing together of oppositional experiences and knowledge. Often incomplete and unstable, archives have become spaces where accounts of histories are contested and expanded through acts of resistance and refusal. Examining the gaps, omissions, and the politics of metadata, “What Stays – Archiving Care” explores how counter-archives can be built through gestures of care, opening up alternative histories, narratives, and stories.
In the context of the discussion event the artists of the digital residency program Aditya Surya Taruna, Romi Ron Morrison, Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson will present their works.
Maya Indira Ganesh has been working at the intersection of new media, digital technologies, gender, visual advocacy and activism and human rights as a researcher, writer, and information-activist. She spent the past eight years with Tactical Technology Collective in Bangalore and Berlin where she was the Director of Applied Research. She is a doctoral candidate at Leuphana University Lüneburg, investigating machine learning, ethics and accountability. She has presented at technology, activism, art and academic events like Eyeo Festival, re:publica, Transmediale, Chaos Communication Congress, Theorizing The Web, Netzpolitik, and at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, among others.
Clara Herrmann is a cultural manager, curator, and editor. She has been head of the JUNGE AKADEMIE of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, since 2019, where she developed a new digital platform as transdisciplinary magazine and space for exhibition and experimentation, as well as the “Human-Machine” Fellowship. Previously she founded and directed the program Digital Solitude of the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart; 2017-18 she was research assistant at the chair of cultural management of the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) and she co-edited the publication Der Digitale Kulturbetrieb – Strategien, Handlungsfelder & Best Practices (The digital cultural sector – Strategies, fields of action and best practices) (2019).
Nora O Murchú became the artistic director of transmediale in 2020. In their research and curatorial practice, they examine intersections between the fields of art, design, software studies, and politics. Their multidisciplinary work embraces narratives and fictions, and results in objects, exhibitions, and interventions. Their research aims to help people understand how complex socio-technical systems are imagined, built, and used.
Sinthujan Varatharajah is an essayist, researcher and political geographer. Their work centres around statelessness, mobility and geographies of power and focuses hereby specifically on the infrastructures, logistics and architectures of displacement. Varatharajahs exhibition "how to move an arch" was part of the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Their first book will be published next year by the German publishing house Hanser.
“What Stays – Archiving Care” is a project by the JUNGE AKADEMIE of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, transmediale festival for digital arts and culture and the Goethe-Institut Slovakia. With an open call for digital residencies for international artists and various online and offline presentation formats, artistic strategies unfolding at the interface of counter-archives and technology will be discussed over the course of one year.