Welcome to Issue One of the Related Materials newsletter
and thank you for joining me to think about archives.
Hi, I'm Anna McNally, an archivist and researcher.
This newsletter is a space for me to think out loud about some of the things I've seen, heard and read recently, and how they are influencing my professional practice. Every month I’ll be sending three recommendations of books, exhibitions, articles or podcasts that I've read, visited or listened to lately.
Exhibition: Moki Cherry: Here and Now at the ICA, London, UK (closes 3 Sep 2023)
Swedish artist, designer and educator Moki Cherry (1943 – 2009) might not be a name you know immediately but if, like me, you grew up in the 80s, you probably spent a good part of the decade in awe of her daughter Neneh. This show at the ICA presents some of Moki's large textile works, videos of her expanded practice within the Stockholm artistic community, as well as archival material such as diaries and notebooks.
Moki wasn't able to achieve recognition for her work during her lifetime, and the archival material selected for the display reflects her frustrations with both the art world and gender roles. She started working with textiles as a more portable medium while travelling with her children, supporting the career of her partner Don Cherry. However these resulted in her being taken even less seriously as an artist, because of their perception as 'just craft'.
I had slightly mixed feelings about the use of the archival material in this exhibition. While the writings provided context to the creation of her work - and made her seem an immensely likeable human being - it also shifted the focus slightly from the work itself to her biography. I’d previously seen some of Moki’s tapestries at an exhibition in Nottingham in 2018, convened by the artist Linder, and I personally found that curation to be more sympathetic and celebratory. That said, I wholeheartedly recommend getting to the exhibition if you have the opportunity - if not, the book Organic Music Societies (Blank Forms, 2021) is an excellent exploration of Moki’s work.
Article: The Whiteprint in Architectural Design Practice [https://nieuweinstituut.nl/en/projects/invented-from-copies/de-witdruk]
Part of the Nieuwe Instituut’s Invented From Copies series, I came across this article recently when I was trying to find out more about the whiteprint process. I’ve recently taken over the management of an archive with a large architectural component and while I knew a little about blueprints, I knew straight away that wasn’t what I was looking at in this collection because, well, they weren’t blue.
While the idea of the ‘original’ and the ‘unique’ still looms large in most discussions around archives, the copy often has a lot more to say for itself. A copy implies a sharing of information. The whiteprint speaks directly of the relationship between the architect and the client - which was fairly fractious in this instance. Within the archive that I’m managing, the whiteprints themselves are often photocopied multiple times and annotated, which again speaks to the confusion of role between architect and client. It’s an archive where the form of the documents often conveys as much as the information within them.
The whiteprint process itself seems to have been fairly short-lived - not widely adopted until the 1950s and then phased out with the introduction of computing to architecture in the 1980s. This in-depth article reconsiders the status of whiteprints as merely copies and instead focuses on what we can learn through considering them as archival documents.
Podcast: New Books Network: Margareta von Osawald and Jonas Tinius, “Awkward Archives: Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum” (Archive Books, 2022)
The New Books Network is a fantastic podcast series for those of us working in research adjacent positions, providing the opportunity to stay up-to-date with publications in academic fields that you might not otherwise have time to engage with. I’ve spent the last week in Scotland packing up an archive on my own, which translates into LOTS of podcast time, and this episode really stood out from everything I listened to.
The project is a series of ethnographic interviews with archivists and others performing archival work (such as digitisation) and how they relate to the collections they work with. The ‘awkward archives’ of the title - a phrase that felt instantly comprehensible to me as an archivist - is here understood to mean “archives posing problems and causing disquieting frictions”. This discomfort allows the archives to become more productive in the present day.
Tinius says in the podcast: “We wanted to see archives and archiving practices not just as it were storage points of documents about the past but, as we say at the beginning of the book, as places that allow for new questions to emerge about the present that are problematising the present in kinds of ways and that are also constantly changing, that are constantly asking new questions.” That’s a very reassuring and affirmative sentence to hear when you’ve been standing in a basement for the four days putting correspondence into acid-free boxes.
It’s still disappointingly rare to hear archivists and archival work acknowledged by academics theorising about archives so this podcast really felt like a breath of fresh air and I look forward to engaging with the publication. The printed version of Awkward Archives (Archive Books, 2022) unfortunately seems to be out of stock everywhere however the text is available as an open access pdf download from the publishers website, and I’m sure I’ll be returning to it in future issues of this newsletter.
Bonus track: Maxwell Sterling: Laced with Rumour: Loud-Speaker of Truth
This work by cellist Maxwell Sterling was played alongside Moki Cherry’s work at the exhibition in Nottingham. Highly recommended if you enjoy Arthur Russell’s more experimental recordings.
Thank you for joining me for this first issue! If you have any recommendations for materials you think I might enjoy, please get in touch - links to my email and social media are on my website.
Anna