2025 - November and December - page 38
Image details
| Issue number | 404 |
|---|---|
| ISSN | 2632-7171 |
| Publication date | 1st November 2025 |
| Transcription |
magazine Community News Experimental Archives conference at Kingston University A successful two-day Experimental Archives conference was held at Kingston University’s Town House from 11th–12th September 2025. Convened by Dr Matt Melia (Senior Lecturer in Media and the Humanities) and Professor Stephen Barber (Research Professor in Art History, School of Art), the event sought to unpack and reframe archival research and practice in new and innovative ways. It also showcased some of the most current work in the field, drawing together researchers, artists and practitioners from across the globe. The conference explored how archives, traditionally and popularly understood as static repositories of knowledge and material, are increasingly being reimagined as dynamic spaces for experimentation, intervention and critical inquiry and spaces for the decentring of power and dominance of all kinds. Presentations and discussions highlighted contemporary experimental and boundary testing archival work, research and creative practice, engaging with questions of: absence; memory, marginality; hauntology and psychogeography; archival “ghosts”; queer identities and politics; film, sound and image; the digital and post-digital and the politics of preservation. This is the second year the conference has run: in 2024 it ran as a one day internal event to showcase archival research being carried out by Kingston staff, this year the organisers opened the call for papers to a much wider community of archival researchers and practitioners. The hope is to build on this momentum, evolving the conference and making it an annual event. 38 Experimental Archives conference at Kingston University The conference featured two fascinating keynote addresses that foregrounded sound as an experimental archival practice. Dr Sandra Jasper (Friedrich-Alexander- Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) and Dr Jonathan Prior (Cardiff University) presented Listening Experiments at the Animal-Sound Archive in Berlin, which traced the archive’s analogue animal sound recordings from 1899 to the present, examining preservation techniques, digitisation, and the ethical questions surrounding early sound capture. Dr Matt Williams (Camden Arts Centre, London) followed with Sonic Palimpsests: Excavating Experimental Archives through Sound-Based Curatorial Practice, showcasing a practice-led methodology for commissioning site-responsive sound works. Drawing on oral histories, audiovisual documents and digital field recordings, Williams highlighted how sound can function as a curatorial method to unearth the layered urban and personal histories of Cox Street in his native Coventry. In bringing together an international community of scholars and practitioners, the Experimental Archives conference created a vibrant forum for dialogue across disciplines. It reflected a growing recognition that archives are not passive containers of history but active sites of cultural production, capable of reshaping how knowledge is preserved, accessed and understood. Please scan here to see an Instagram reel of the event Dr Matthew Melia Senior Lecturer in Media and the Humanities, Kingston University |