Academy for Theatre and Dance | February 22nd, 2024

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Ink drawings are scattered around the room, propped up against bags, or the wall. All of these works are in conversation with each other. Webs connect everything in this newly made archive. Discussing resonances and relevance, we are [un]learning through these collections together. 

Artists Janne Igbuwe and Mariana Lanari shared their practice in an exchange that brought forth the resonances in their archival work. In this session, participants engaged in intuitive drawing exercises, learned about archival projects, and entered a joint discussion that challenges prevailing hierarchies of knowledge within the making of archives.

Janne’s visual research and drawing practice revolves around themes of culture, identity and 'colour', presented in both poetic and socially engaged ways. She finds resonances between her collection of personal photography, textures and image clippings, and her own painting practice and intuitive art making, allowing her archive to serve as ongoing inspiration. Using the embodied process of drawing with the participants in this session, the experience was documented as an emotional archive of sorts, something to be felt, revisited, and reinterpreted. 

As the co-founder of the project “Archival Consciousness”, Mariana Lanari shared her own practice and ways of engaging with physical and digital mediation in cultural libraries through community-oriented semantic technologies. By presenting her practice and later conversing with Janne, links were made in understanding archives as a personal and political tool for transformation. Asking “how can we activate archives in a way that remains intuitive and urgent?”