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Art in the Archive Bursary: Glitching the Archive

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The Women’s Art Library and Feminist Review are inviting submissions for the Art in the Archive Bursary 2020.

This year’s aim is to create a “remote residency” based in the Women’s Art Library collection as an unofficially digitized archive. The residency will be facilitated by the collection’s curator to ensure an in-depth engagement with the WAL material regardless of whether the collections are physically accessible or not.

About the residency

This call is structured around the problems of communication and urgent need to continue communities through the available bandwidth and often ad hoc technologies of our homes. As some struggle to speak with friends, colleagues, students and loved ones across glitching video links and rolling WhatsApp chats, artists, writers and curators are invited to imagine how to engage with a physically inaccessible archive. What might be the potential of exploring the Women’s Art Library through digital means, whilst refusing a techno-fantasy of complete access?

Glitching the Archive identifies the glitch as a way to read what or who is missing from the archive and/or dropping out of sight. While pandemic restrictions are impacting women’s research and creative visibility, the digital traces of the Women’s Art Library are glitchy, suspended in different networks, even in technological limbo.

Glitching the Archive resonates with WAL’s origin as a grassroots intervention and is also inspired by the proactive terms Legacy Russell sets out in her Glitch Feminist Manifesto as “an error in a social system that has already been disturbed by economic, racial, social, sexual, and cultural stratification of the imperialist wrecking-ball of globalization” that has the potential to become “a correction to the “machine”, and, in turn, a positive departure.” (Legacy Russell, The Society Pages, 2013)[1]

The residency is supported by a grant of £1850 + £250 to be used towards a publication/output platformed through Feminist Review. Projects can be devised as digital or not, but will need to based on research in the WAL collection.

Application information

Submissions should include:

  • A CV including links to relevant past projects
  • Supporting documentation
  • A proposed project title and summary of the proposal (max 100 words)
  • A detailed project outline including a plan for a publication in digital and/or material form. (max 500 words) 

The submission deadline is 1 September 2020. Please email your submission to Althea Greenan a.greenan(@gold.ac.uk).

Residency date

October 2020 – February 2021

Presentation event

March 2021

Previous examples of online/digital projects

Stable digital repositories


[1] 
"In a society that conditions the public to find discomfort or outright fear in the errors and malfunctions of our socio-cultural mechanics—illicitly and implicitly encouraging an ethos of “Don’t rock the boat!”—a “glitch” becomes an apt metonym. Glitch Feminism, however, embraces the causality of “error”, and turns the gloomy implication of glitch on its ear by acknowledging that an error in a social system that has already been disturbed by economic, racial, social, sexual, and cultural stratification and the imperialist wrecking-ball of globalization—processes that continue to enact violence on all bodies—may not, in fact, be an error at all, but rather a much-needed erratum. This glitch is a correction to the “machine”, and, in turn, a positive departure."