Defining materiality

Since the archival turn, materiality, and affective responses to the material encounter with the archive, have been popular ways for writers and scholars from other disciplines to approach the archive; similarly, there has been a longstanding interest among artists in working creatively with ideas of the archive. As an archivist specialising in art and design archives, I was intrigued by these responses to the archives and their spaces where I worked. This brought me to new understandings that the archive’s "emergent capacities"¹ are in part about its physical properties and their affect, experienced as both a viewer and cohabitant of the archive; indeed, I reflect on these questions as a researcher. Materiality is defined as "the quality or character of being material or composed of matter". As archivists, our discourse and practice tends to pay more attention to the function, content and context of records and documents; Ala Rekrut, trained as both conservator and archivist, is a notable exception to this and her work was an early reference point for our book. Indeed, a material sensibility is part of the "craft knowledge" of the archivist, as Alexandrina Buchanan argues in the first chapter of our book The Materiality of the Archive: Creative Practice in Context.

An interdisciplinary symposium refined the concept

Our book was conceived from an interest in reaching outwards from the archive, to connect with this work. Its origins lay in a symposium in September 2016, which Wendy Russell and I co-organised as members of the then ARLIS (Art Libraries Society) Committee for Art and Design Archives (CADA), and which was held at the University of Brighton. The event was part of a strand of programming developing interdisciplinary exchange and reflection on archival practices in visual arts contexts. With our call for papers we wanted to reach across and beyond the extensive attention to materiality we’d observed across a range of disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, art and design history, literary studies and material culture, connecting them with archive studies, and considering materiality as a framework for engaging with archives of art and design. The event attracted speakers from a broad range not only of approaches to materiality, but also of understandings of the archive: for example, using it interchangeably with collection, or to describe museum objects which are not on display and are therefore out of use and sight. It was clear that, while there was wide ranging interest in the theme, a publication proposal required greater focus in its framing of the archive. To make a coherent volume, we chose to start from an archivist’s definition of the archive. We hoped this would allow us to push the boundaries of archival materiality more usefully than by assembling too many diverse notions of the archive, with their associated conceptual slippages.

Materiality as connective tissue

The book had a very long gestation period, because the arrival of Covid during its preparation created extraordinary challenges not for its editors, as mothers juggling childcare and home learning and home working, and for many of our contributors. Nevertheless, we were able to assemble 16 chapters by an amazing range of authors, to this end. We called our introduction ‘Materiality as Connective Tissue’ with the aim of highlighting and characterising the range of ways that materiality could connect archive studies with other disciplines, while acknowledging the impossibility of any kind of exhaustive survey. We suggested that through a material culture lens it might seem self-evident that archives are a form of material culture, but we argued that this risks subsuming archives, whereas we wanted to foreground the characteristic materialities of the archive on more equal terms with material culture, and map the points of connection and exchange at the intersection between the two.

There is a circularity in the way object and document can enrich one another – for example Catherine Richardson argues that medieval and early modern estate inventories show how ‘language conjures things into being’ by evoking in the mind of the reader the lost material goods to which they attest, and the status in life and death to which they bear witness. Critical to both archives and material culture is an interest in their context, with people – actors – always central to the equation. In the book, archives are considered not as "mere things in themselves" but for "their complex role in the relationship between objects and subjects", as design historian Judy Attfield wrote of objects, in defining material culture.

Structuring the book: outwards from the archive

We explicitly wanted to start the volume from the archive, as this is where our own encounters, and the theories underpinning them, are located, to keep it front and centre, given the absence of archivist voices from much "archival turn" literature. In our opening chapter, Dr Alexandrina Buchanan, who directs the Archive Studies programme at the University of Liverpool, charts the history of materiality in the historiography of archives and of archive studies. The other three chapters in this section addressed aspects of materiaity as experienced and investigated from the perspective of archivists and archive curators, and for many archivist readers this is probably the most familiar territory. In the three following sections, we move outwards: Part 2, "With the Archive: Energy" brings together a number of evocations of vital forces at play in encounters with the archive as research material. Part 3, "About the Archive: Technologies" is perhaps the most diverse section in the volume, featuring literary scholar, a media theorist, a filmmaker/researcher, and a conservator, addressing different technologies of the archive and their implications. The fourth and final section, Beyond the Archives: Expanding the Frame, reaches outwards beyond the conventional boundaries and emplacements of the archive, reflecting contemporary concerns about what materials and materialities are accepted into the archive, whose stories are told there, and to whom they belong in material form. These chapters show how expansions of the concept of what, and where, the archive is, can not only bring new forms of knowledge into play, but also more voices in its ownership and formulation, in the archival multiverse ². The collection ends with a group-authored piece by researchers at Tate, presenting a collaborative approach to archive making through socially engaged art practice, challenging conventional boundaries between archive and artwork.

Together, the volume is an attempt to plot new understandings and deeper engagement with the materiality of the archive, seeing these practices and investigations "not as a way of establishing kinds of stable knowledge, but rather as an active ongoing process of exploring, testing, assessing, repairing, conserving and reappraising the connections of archival objects to the world, to other bodies of knowers and objects." ³

The book is available in open access on the Taylor and Francis website by clicking here.