Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 2 Readings with Annet Dekker, and Susanna Ånäs and Ali Akbar Mehta

In this event, Annet Dekker is invited to present her contribution to Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 2 “Archival absurdity, or a walk in the park”. Annet Dekker’s text takes us on a journey from her childhood garden with sweet berry bushes to her new allotment garden, and further onwards to think-with a speculative project based in Helsinki Central Park. Allotment Archives is a project which mirrors a real project (Central Park Archives) but remains a fictional thinking exercise. Annet’s fictitious project Allotment Archives invites us to consider different approaches for commons archiving from the artist-activist to the federative-archivist.

Following Annet’s reading, artists Susanna Ånäs and Ali Akbar Mehta from m-cult project Central Park Archives will share responses to Annet’s text in reflection with their own work. The final part of this event invites questions and responses from contributors and audiences.

A free-flowing conversation with Annet Decker, Susanna Ånäs, and myself on archival practices. Beginning with the reading of an excerpt from Annet’s text, we talk about artist-archivists, federated archives, the #fediverse model, networks of care, and the importance of generating archives as a method to voice and preserve marginalised knowledges.

This conversation came at the heels of an equally robust afternoon where we launched the prototype of our project Keskuspuistoarkistot / Central Park Archives: an online composite archive project seeking to preserve microhistories through generating co-archiving practices.

Together they represent the culmination of months of work, and for Susanna and I, the end of a fruitful and rich residency with M-cult.

Thank you Minna Tarkka, Iida Nissinen, and Kalle Kuisma from mcult to all their support and backing the project through months of hard work; Jussi Koitela and Yvonne Billimore and Frame Contemporary Art Finland for their support as partners to mcult through the #gatheringforrehearsinghospitalies2020 programme.

We could not have done this without the technical support from Arun Ganesh and Palash Mukhopadhyay.

And of course all the support through a growing community of #maunula partners: everyone who shared their stories and contributed years of work through their material documents.

About the speakers:

Annet Dekker is assistant professor Media Studies: Archival and Information Studies at the University of Amsterdam and visiting professor and co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University. She has previously been Researcher, Digital Preservation at Tate, London and core tutor at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, and Fellow at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. Alongside being an independent curator, she worked as web curator for SKOR (Foundation for Art and Public Domain) and curator/head of exhibitions, education and artists in residence at the Netherlands Media Art Institute.

Central Park Archives is a project exploring practices of collaborative archiving, together with communities and residents of Maunula, Helsinki. This long-term project is inaugurated in 2020 as a local/online residency with artists Susanna Ånäs and Ali Akbar Mehta, both whose artistic practices deal with conceptual extensions of the archive and the commons. The project is co-produced by Iida Nissinen and Minna Tarkka from digital culture and collaborative art agency m-cult.

How to access copies:

• Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 2 is available as an open access PDF and in hard copy. In addition, it will be released as ebook and audiobook versions later in the autumn. Download the publication PDF here.
• Hard copies can be purchased from the Archive Books website.
• In addition, Frame is distributing a limited number of hard copies for free from their office space in Helsinki. These can be collected on Thursday 24th September and Thursday 1st October from 10:00 - 15:00. Full information on how to access the building is available on their website.