Sensing the Archive - exploring the terrain between past and present

Sensing the Archive is an online, arts-based research workshop exploring the terrain between past and present. Working from materials from personal, cultural, or collective archives, such as family photos and everyday objects to inherited stories or ritual tools, we will create new connections, meanings or insights and uncover what might emerge through creative process and arts-based research methods. 

Using experiential prompts, we’ll inquire into how the body responds to archival material and what forms of hidden, intuitive, or felt knowledge become available when we attend to these encounters with care.

This workshop is suitable for anyone curious about memory, creativity, ancestry, place, or personal storytelling. No arts experience is required.

Workshop Overview

Participants are invited to bring in an image, object, or text regarding a personal, cultural, or collective archive.  Through facilitated arts-based inquiry, this item becomes the starting point for generating artistic “data”; images, gestures, words, marks that allow new stories, meanings, and orders to take shape.
The term ‘archive’ normally refers to materials forming a national or historical account, but here it is used more broadly to refer to any series of materials that capture a personal, creative or cultural phenomena. In this way, workshop participants could be working on an archive that does not yet exist formally, or adding to an archive that is incomplete. Particularly where intergenerational or place-based connection has been disrupted through death, migration, estrangement or other life events, ‘sensing’ the archive and forming its materials can act as a ritual of closure. 

What you'll experience:

Pre-workshop reading or listening [Optional]: Review of audio and text materials in relation to the workshop themes (max 30 mins).

Reflective Provocations: Presented with different framings of the archive from philosophy and artistic practice, consider which ideas resonate with or challenge you in regards to your archive (no prior knowledge required).

Emergent Creation: Using your felt sense, create artistic data to form your archive through practices of conscious experiencing and art making.

Identify and Order: Undertake procedures to imagine varying connections and orders in which to read the archival materials, including linear and non-linear connections.

Creative Guidance: Experience individual or small group (2-3 people) guidance to go deeper into what is most curious in your archive. This may include offering or receiving responses to your data, if desired.

Final Synthesis: Synthesise what you have come to know about your archive and how you now frame its meaning. This can be shared back to the group through performance, image, or text, or simply a reflection. 

A certificate of attendance will be provided after completion

Your facilitator

Nithya Iyer (MA, Therapeutic Arts Practice, MIECAT)
Nithya Iyer is an interdisciplinary researcher and mediator working across text, visual arts, participatory and performative mediums. Using improvised and dialogic encounters, her inquiries regard ruptures in spatial and temporal continuities that give rise to alternative readings of bodies, territories and intergenerational narratives. In her mediation practice she applies phenomenological method to the intersection of academic and arts-based praxis, whilst integrating decolonial and feminist principles. Connecting with institutions, projects and networks in Portugal, India and Australia, She has presented solo, collaborative and participatory interventions that focus on research as both practice and form.

Please note this is not designed as a personal therapy experience, participants need to be able to monitor their own physical and mental well-being and consider their level of engagement.