Form and Function Creative Approaches to Archiving

2-day workshop | Saturday-Sunday, July 19-20, 2025

12:00 - 04:00 PM | Both days

G5A warehouse, Mahalaxmi

Language of Instruction: English

Please Note: All participants must attend both days in-person. Participants are refrained from choosing to attend either of the 2 days of the workshop.

Over the course of this two-day workshop, 20 participants will be exploring art, memory, history, and power through the medium of archives and archiving. Participants will think about what they want to preserve and who they want to preserve it for, what the method and structure of preservation will be, and how it will influence outcomes. They will also think critically about archives and their limitations, and the power of narrative to steer history. 

The participants will engage in workshops on the following topics:

1. Preservation: What do we want to preserve and how do we best do this? We will look at examples including but not limited to digital material, photographs, plastics, letters and documents, and textiles.

2. Organization: How can the structure of how we store our memory influence how it is understood?

3. Access: We will look at how to think and dream through the archive, imagining what the future will look like and how we want people in the future to understand what we have saved.

About Mira Brunner

Mira is an artist, archivist, and writer. Aside from nearly 10 years of experience in archives – She started training at the Louise Bourgeois Archive in 2016 – and returned to her artistic practice in recent years, and find much inspiration from my day job. Her work is concerned with time, money, illness, and death. Mira tries and uses what she thinks of as “subconscious objects”, namely toys, dolls, and games, as an archive of social structure and hierarchy. She currently works at QAMRA, the Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection, and Activism (qamra.in) in Bengaluru.

Requirements:

Participants must bring an item from their personal collection with them. This item will be be used to expand/question the archive.Examples of potential items include: smells, memories, clothing, anything deemed unimportant or ephemeral, materials from communities overlooked by the archive, organic matter or anything that decays, the body as archive, and oral traditions. The item need not be any of the examples - participants are encouraged to use their creativity.

Some items could be letters, photographs, government records, prints, maps, sound recordings, films, diaries, artworks (usually prints Or 2D). The range of items are not limited to the above mentioned examples.

Rules and Regulations:

1. All participants must be 18 years and above and sign up online before the workshop.
2. All participants must attend both days in-person. Participants are refrained from choosing to attend either of the 2 days of the workshop.

Please note: The participants are refrained from choosing to attend either of the 2 days of the workshop. In case of any queries with regards to the workshop or any way that we can assist in you being part of the workshop, please email us [email protected].