CHAIR: Antoine Damiens

Julia Polyck-O’Neill (online: https://uqam.zoom.us/j/9515655240?pwd=djM5dnFTUE4zNXBlYkxsTmhNdEJPdz09)

Joyce Wieland’s Potential Archive: Media and Remediation in the Feminist Media Archive

The networked and collaborative nature of artistic practice and media production frequently
confounds traditional archival conventions. International organizations invested in the preservation and dissemination of interdisciplinary media arts, such as LIMA (Amsterdam) and the Getty (Los Angeles), have problematized the ways available ontologies for conceptualizing and developing the archiving of media objects flatten fundamental aspects of media artworks and their histories. Feminist archival studies scholars Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor argue that traditional archival practice is rooted in colonial and patriarchal cultural and structural conditions and propose a “feminist ethical framework” that situates the archive within the sphere of feminist, materialist informatics, socially, materially, and culturally, with consideration of relational and affective contexts. Deena Engel and Glen Wharton, media scholars specializing in artists’ archives, have addressed how the limitations of conventional archival systems often fail to accommodate the kinds of information, accuracy, and logistical affordances scholars and arts professionals require for their research. Specialists in feminist archival studies respond to such shortcomings, observing how the practice of the co-creation of archives with the artists represented within the collections can contribute meaningfully to the value of the collection for scholars and communities by making networks and collaborations visible. The Joyce Wieland fonds at the Clara Thomas Archives at York University, donated by Wieland and her estate, consists mostly of textual documents and photodocumentation despite the nature of Wieland’s often collaborative art practice, working in film, video, painting, and textile – media and art objects largely held by other institutions. In this paper, I analyze the ways in which the breadth of Wieland’s creative output has been remediated by means of text and other documentation within the fonds in the Clara Thomas collection and draw attention to the ways that collaborative and networked archival methods could benefit both the collection and its users. I argue that the addition of (auto)biographical, narrative, and networked data and digital media forms might enable increased access and have the potential to transform the relationships between artist, archival institutions, and users, making media arts archives more ethical and authentic on the one hand and more useful on the other.

Em Barton
The Archive as a Problem of Form: Queer Feminist Film Scenes at Toronto’s Funnel

This presentation takes as its case study the archive of queer feminist underground film scenes within The Funnel Experimental Theatre Co-op (1977-1987). This archive comes up against multiple tensions: the underground, and thus ephemeral, nature of experimental filmmaking which exists beyond the institutional/archive, the convergences of identarian position – marked by experiences of homophobia, sexism, and racism – and the form of experimental filmmaking. Consequently, this presentation thinks about Toronto’s queer feminist archive as a problem of form: materially, relationally, conceptually, and politically. In 1976, Peter Wollen wrote “the two avant-gardes”: a dualism between European and Asian political modernist and American formalist cinemas. This left the Funnel’s queer feminist players of in a double bind: not legibly formalist or properly political enough. In tracing the Funnel’s histories, this paper illustrates how formal tensions obfuscate the archive of Toronto’s queer feminist film. Toronto’s lust for an art scene was fashioned out of its absence. A scene is a fantasy of collectivity – an erotics for community. As there were no spaces for queer women in Toronto, players moved between artist run centres, galleries, bars, and other nighttime economies. The promise of these communities, of their fringe nature, lies in “sex, a cause, some vague utopian hope” (Hoolbloom 2002). The fringe, what I name the scene here, is the fantasy of a collectivity on the horizon, whose history is dependent on non-evidentiary materials. To think through these problematics of form in relation to the archive, I utilize the methodology of archival assemblage which thinks about the non-fixity of identity that is temporally and relationally bound (Brilmyer 2019) and speculative media history in the absence of the archive (Field 2022). This paper hopes to intervene in queer and feminist histories in Toronto beyond New Queer Cinema and Studio D and thought about the minor archives.

Jonathan Petrychyn
Remembering and Remediating Intergenerational Queer, Anti-Racist, and Feminist Media Activism

This presentation focuses on the process of documenting and remembering three important, yet precarious, queer, anti-racist, and feminist film festivals held in Canada in the 1980s and1990s: Colour Positive Anti-Racist Film Festival (Toronto, 1984), Positively Queer Film & Vide Festival (Saskatoon, 1995) and Vice Versa Lesbian Film & Video Festival (Winnipeg, 1995). While I narrate how these festivals were intersectionally organized and programmed, my larger aim is to discuss the intergenerational and care-based methodology undertaken to narrate these stories. Building research relationships, gaining information through participatory processes, and working with vulnerable communities to make their audio-visual archives accessible is as much about the process as it is about outcomes. As a millennial researcher, I reflect on the various intergenerational interactions across this project – between myself and the archives, the activists, and my own students – to offer pathways for remediating media activist archives within contemporary activist praxis. Such work remains vital because many of my students and colleagues working in the media arts sector still believe that the history of media activism in Canada is either nonexistent or overwhelmingly white, heterosexual, and male. In fact, this could not be further from the truth.
The primary record of queer, anti-racist, and feminist media is rapidly disintegrating and, with it, a key piece of the intersecting histories of the queer, anti-racist, and feminist movements in Canada (Bociurkiw 2016). The holdings that do exist in institutional archives are not necessarily representative of the diverse field of queer, anti-racist and feminist media history; there remain numerous stories uncaptured by oral history, and physical documents still housed in basements, attics, and file cabinets (Belle, Khan, Smith & Singh 2020; Petrychyn 2020). As a result, these histories remain outside of the epistemological frame of many contemporary activists and scholars (Eichhorn 2013). These memories and documents are in danger of disappearing because the precarity of these activist collectives makes their physical documents and the memories of the events themselves prone to being lost (Armatage 2009). In a contemporary moment where queer, anti-racist, and feminist movements are under attack, it is important now more than ever that we remember and remediate these histories before they disappear.

Stéfy McKnight (online: https://uqam.zoom.us/j/9515655240?pwd=djM5dnFTUE4zNXBlYkxsTmhNdEJPdz09)
Aqtion Arqhive: Intersectional and Socially-engaged Approaches to Curating with Care

In an interview between Syrus Marcus Ware, Monica Forrester and Channelle Gallant, Monica Forrester states “I wish I took pictures” (2018:24), referring to her engagement in leading sex work activism in Toronto. She writes “Nobody thought about archiving things because no one really thought we we’d live past thirty” (24). Then, archiving Queer movements and demonstrations wasn’t at the forefront of the mind of Queer activists, despite activism being a means of survival. Instead, activism by Trans workers, especially Trans People of Colour, was a risk that often prioritized the moment, rather than a view of the future (Haritaworn et al, 2018).
“Queer erasure” in archives, art, and media reflect this fraught history entangled in webs of hetero-patriarchal, colonial, and western movements of anti-2SLGBTQIA+ folx and actions (Scot, 2014). To contribute to the urgent need for more Queer centered archival projects, we created a research-creation project titled ““Aqtion Arqhive: Tracing 2SLGBTQIA+ labour activism in the Katarokwi-Kingston Region (Aqtion Arqhive)”. “Aqtion Arqhive” is an online digital archive using using Esri Storymaps (arcGIS) of the Katarokwi/Kingston region which includes artworks, posters, campaign documentation, policy statements, and media coverage that centre Queer workers and solidarity. This project historicizes these events while also archiving the important work produced by Queer workers and unions in the fight for equity in the workplace. More importantly, “Aqtion Arqhive” centres feminist research-creation methodologies of social justice and care-centric models of sharing and celebrating our work (Loveless, 2019). We do this, by prioritizing the needs of the community, through community interviews, by collecting posters, zines and handouts, as well as commissioning artists to create work about their experiences. The open-source archive is available for all to experience and enjoy. This paper will share the methodological process of creating “Aqtion Arqhive”, as well as insight on how to curate community-based online archives care-fully. Our research-creation project “Aqtion Arqhive” is a form of care-centric, archival “catch up”, that gives Queer activists in the Katarokwi-Kingston region the ability to share and celebrate our stories of resistance, while also archiving our work
and communal knowledges.