Welcome to Issue Thirteen of Related Materials
Sliding into your inbox with some year-end archival recommendations
Hi, I'm Anna McNally, an archivist and researcher.
Did you miss me last month? I was in an unheated self-storage unit, doing the final packing up of a 450 box archive that I’ve been working with for the last year, getting it ready for its brand new temperature-controlled home. It was hugely professionally satisfying to see the project to completion but didn’t leave much time for writing newsletters.
However I’m back in the land of central heating now with, as usual, three things that have made me think about archives lately.
Exhibition: Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker at Nottingham Contemporary until 5 January 2025/Bonnington Vitrines 25:Donald Rodney in Nottingham at the Bonnington Gallery until 14 December 2024
First up, and a key driver for getting this newsletter sent before one of the exhibitions actually closes, is the two Donald Rodney exhibitions currently showing in Nottingham. Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker is a touring exhibition which has previously been at Spike Island in Bristol - it will be coming to the Whitechapel Gallery in London in February 2025, but the Bonnington Vitrines show won’t be, and I was keen to have the chance to see both these two complementary exhibitions alongside each other.
For those who are unfamiliar with his name, especially any non-UK readers, Donald Rodney (1961-1998) was a Black British artist whose work addressed Britain’s colonial past as well as his own fragile health, before his untimely death from sickle cell anemia. As several of these are in the Tate collection, I'd got to know them well while I was working there, but the Visceral Canker exhibition is a thrilling opportunity to see almost his entire artistic output at once and included several unexpected and unfamiliar pieces. I was particularly struck by the titular Visceral Canker (1990) which consists of two wooden heraldic signs, tubes and pumps circulating imitation blood. The explanatory panel informs us that Rodney was keen to use his own blood but the local authority who commissioned the work ‘intervened’ - I’d love to have been a fly on the wall for that council meeting. The show also includes items from his archive, in particular the series of sketchbooks which enabled him to continue working while he was in hospital.
Meanwhile the exhibition at the Bonnington Gallery concentrates on Rodney’s time studying at Nottingham Trent Polytechnic in the 1980s. I was fortunate to have a tour of this exhibition from one of the curators, Joshua Lockwood-Moran. He described how the starting part for their research was looking through the University’s photographic archive and finding a photograph of Rodney as a student - unnamed but recognisable by his distinctive glasses. From there they spoke to artists who had been friends with Rodney in his student days and were able to borrow a treasure trove of material - polaroids of Rodney at parties, ephemera from the BLK Art Group and for events organised across the Midlands - which can all be seen in the Vitrines exhibition.
Seen alongside each other, the two exhibitions present not contrasting but complementary views of Rodney’s life and work. Visceral Canker - while a fantastic exhibition - presents a view of Rodney as a singular artist. Although it uses some archival material to represent exhibitions he was part of, these are all inevitably turned to the page for Rodney’s work so you get little sense of whose work was shown alongside his. The Vitrines exhibition places Rodney within a network of artists and organisations. You get a sense of his work developing as a result of these connections and conversations, as well as placing him within the specific geographical location of the Midlands as opposed to the London art scene.
The two exhibitions also demonstrate the perspectives you get from different kinds of research - from researching an individual’s own archive (their fonds in archival terminology) as distinct from how they might be recorded in the fonds of other individuals and organisations, through photographs, correspondence and printed ephemera. This is, of course, particularly important when someone’s own fonds doesn’t survive and all we have is the reflected image. It’s not to say that one is more accurate than the other, just that their different.
If you can get to Nottingham before the Vitrines exhibition closes (ahem tomorrow) then absolutely take the opportunity - you can also get a great breakfast at the cafe at Nottingham Contemporary.
Reading: The Deaths and Rebirths of Chris Marker’s CD-ROM Immemory by Isabel Ochoa Gold
I recently fell down a Chris Marker wormhole on YouTube, which feels like a very Chris Marker thing to do. It started, of course, with one of his videos about Tokyo and then the algorithm served us up a short documentary on Marker featuring Terry Gilliam in an excellent sweater, and that was how I came to learn about Marker's Immemory CD-ROM project
Immediately keen to know more (long time readers will remember our previous foray into CD-ROM games in Issue Two ) , I obviously did what any normal person would do and googled, which brought me to this article from 2020.
‘In the opening image of the program, you’re met with the words “Enter the Memory.” Click, and you will find a massive planet containing eight continents Marker calls “zones”: Cinema, War, Memory, Photography, Poetry, Travel, Museum, and X-Plugs. These basic categories hide its overwhelmingly interwoven terrain.’ That sounds pretty fantastic anyway and then you learn that it was all navigated by a cat avatar.
So the two questions here are: one, obviously, where can I play it and two, why was this article being written in 2020 (other than the fact that we all had a lot of time on our hands). Bonus points to the digital archivists who have already guessed the answer to the second question.
Being a CD-ROM, the first question inevitably has its complexities. Marker wrote the original program on Hyperstudio, which was designed for school children, and saved it to multiple floppy disks. This was then converted into a CD-ROM by Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang from the band Galaxie 500 [truly a sentence that even an LLM wouldn’t hallucinate] first in 1998, and then an updated version in 2008. By 2011, with the CD-ROM format on the fast-track to obsolence, the Centre Pompidou created a version of Immemory on the https://gorgomancy.net/ website which hosts other Marker projects. Except - and here’s the punchline - they used Flash to create the website.
As every digital archivist will tell you with a weary voice, support for Flash was removed at the end of 2020.
The good news is that between this article being written in 2020 and today, the excellent people at the Centre Pompidou have managed to resurrect Immemory once more . As this detailed and fascinating exploration of the process makes clear, each time the work is migrated the entire underlying technical architecture has to be be re-written in order to preserve the look and feel of the work. To document this process, the conservators created a complex map of the 1552 individual ‘screens’ within the work, and the links and hyper-links between them. While crucial for the preservation of the work, the very existence of this document risks spoiling the experience that Marker intended for the user - getting lost within the architecture of the work.
Should you wish to get lost within the work yourself, it is now available online again at https://gorgomancy.net/ - although sadly my complete lack of French language knowledge means I’m reduced to just looking at the pictures.
Reading: Closet Archive by Shannon Mattern
This article was sent to me by a friend (thanks Sara!) and has been on my mind a lot for the last few months. As I mentioned above, I’ve had the slightly strange experience of spending an extended period of time working in a self-storage facility on an industrial estate in North London. Each morning I would walk down a corridor of identical orange doors with non-identical padlocks, with no clue as to what was on the other side. I got to know some of the people with units near us - one of whom kindly donated us a slightly broken office chair which improved my working life by around 300% - and everyone was just as curious as to what others had in their unit.
Of course, we were special because ours was an archive rather than just stuff. But working outside of the boundaries of the traditional archival infrastructure really shines a light (something I could have used in a more literal sense some days!) on how thin and fuzzy those lines are. I’ve written before, early in my career about the process that happens to allow boxes and bags of old papers to become an archive, but I’ve never actually witnessed - or made it happen - at such a large scale before.
Mattern’s article discusses the development of the closet within domestic architecture - both as a space to hide oneself away and a space to store the inevitable accumulation of things that modern life generates. I was reminded of Alex Kerr’s Lost Japan - as fascinating book originally written in Japanese for a Japanese audience - where he describes how the prized empty homes of the wealthy with only a single seasonally appropriate item on display were only achieveable through having a separate outhouse where all the seasonally inappropriate objects were stored.
In Closet Archive, Mattern argues that the family closet is a space for the active construction of memory. The items are meant to be taken out and handled and in doing so we feel the truth of that knowledge. That it’s “a site of creation, transformation, and mediation”. I hope this will also be the case with the archive that I’ve been working with, as we prepare to make it available for research in the new year.
Bonus track: Soleil by Oren Ambarchi [bandcamp link]
From the album Sul (dedicated to Chris Marker), which explores the idea of ‘zone’ in Marker’s work. The liner notes explain that “In French, the word zone appears to encompass both the general idea of a given space, as well as the more specific meaning of an abandoned urban area where the waste products mount up.” which seemed like a particularly appropriate track for discussing a self-storage unit. Although, as much as I adore the kind of music, my unofficial soundtrack for the project was something slightly more upbeat.
Thanks for reading! Related Materials is taking a break in January and will be back in February, when it will almost certainly by an extended treatise on the Hello Kitty archive. You have been warned.
Anna