The Need to Historize

Semi public Working meeging/Symposium: The Need to Historize
tranzitdisplay, Dittrichova 9,  Prague 2, Czech Republic
15 – 18 December, 2011
conference organized by tranzit.cz and SWEET 60s (tranzit.at)
Main partner: ERSTE Foundation
www.tranzit.org

Subject of working meeting:
Over the last decade a number of artistic, theoretical and inter-disciplinary initiatives and activities have appeared in the artistic community, resuscitating the relatively classical topos of the “archive”.

It is precisely this geographical and epistemological variety of archive interests that has led us to organise a modest working meeting. Its aim will be to create an inter-personal communication network among those involved in new narratives of classification and archiving. It is not that we intend to make a summing up, but rather to initiate communication between players from the former Communist bloc and those from the Middle- East, two regions in which the role of the revaluation of history, subjective and collective memory, their discontinuities and parallelism, holds a topical political and artistic dimension.

Contents of working meeting:
The talks will focus on Archives from a personal standpoint. Participants will provide an introductory insight into the issues involved and orientation with regard to typologies, structures and origins of their particular interest to the archives. One important issue is formal conception mirroring the way their  are organised and structured (i.e. the epistemology).
The main topics of your talks should revolve around ways of working with individual archives, different approaches regarding how to edit them and a search for conceptual frameworks within which sets of archives are selected.

The working meeting will take the form of presentations by guests of their activities followed by working discussions.