ONLINE COURSE

ACTIVATING ARCHIVES

Photography, Ecology, and Historical Change in the Anthropocene

DR BERGIT ARENDS

Archives provide compelling insights not only into environmental changes but also into ideologies and cultures of nature, into vulnerabilities, responsibilities for and the effects of change. They not only document but shape the proposition of the Anthropocene, which seeks to describe histories and consequences of human interventions into the natural world. This course explores the connections between photography, archives, ecology and historical change in the presence of the narratives of the Anthropocene. It introduces these thematic areas and explicates their interactions.

We will examine, in depth, selected transhistorical engagements with archives as lived and performative sites by contemporary artists, and the different roles of photography within the processes of formation and transformation in their projects. We will discuss photographs as images and objects, as scientific practice, as social practice and as artistic practice for documentary as well as art photography.

The lectures centre on dialogues between different kinds of voices: engagements with mute historical records and with the photo-object to activate them creatively, exchanges between collaborators and conversations with users of archives and exhibitions. The projects we discuss narrate environments as a field of study as well as a critique of human intervention and the separation between humans and nonhumans in European understandings. The artistic projects to be studied however generate dialogues across moments in history, making these works productive to imaging and presenting environmental change. They discard single modes of seeing environmental transformations in favour of a multiple and de-centred environmental imagination.

We will study photography a participatory and collaborative method for intervening in environmental knowledge. The course foregrounds artistic documentary practices, critical fabulation, and ‘reperformance’, an engagement with historical visual and written materials and the processes that generated these. We will take an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from curatorial studies, historical geography, art theory and environmental studies.

COURSE STRUCTURE

The course takes place over one month and includes four in-depth sessions of three hours each, held weekly.

As part of the programme, participants will enjoy complimentary access to ARCHIVO’s public events throughout the course duration, including the Webinar Series and the Open Sessions, offering further opportunities for discussion, and exchange.

Dr Bergit Arends is a curator of contemporary art, museum professional, and academic with research interests in the intersections of research-based artistic and curatorial practices, material culture, and environmental history within European and global contexts. Her monograph Photography, Ecology and Historical Change in the Anthropocene: Activating Archives (2024) is part of the Routledge series Photography, Place, Environment. Her doctoral research resulted among other in the award-winning publication Chrystel Lebas. Field Studies (2018). Bergit has curated many contemporary art projects for the natural history museums in London and Berlin. She was British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Bristol and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she is a Teaching Fellow. She is Curatorial Research Fellow in the UK Research and Innovation Network Plus ‘Shifting Global Polarities: Russia, China and Eurasia in transition’; and Research Associate in the international CoastARTS project, working on coasts as zones ecocultural crisis. She has contributed to many award selection panels, including After Nature. Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize at C/O Berlin.