Secretariat for Ghosts, Archival Politics and Gaps: THE MANY ARCHIVES!

102 years after being founded, the Austrian Association of Women Artists (Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinne Österreichs, VBKOE) is opening the Secretariat for Ghosts, Archival Politics and Gaps. The new Secretariat shall enable a critical analysis and examination of the association’s history. In particular, the role of the VBKOE during the course of Austrofaschism and Nationalsozialism will be discussed, alongside the association’s class-specific and colonial entanglements.

The Secretariat establishes connections between projects, investigations and discussions by different authors and in various formats setting up a continual, multi-perspective and collective historical work. The structures and methods of the Secretariat will enable the continual analysis of historical narratives anew and create a space in which historical works can be learnt and unlearnt. Thereby, feminist and decolonizing perspectives will be integrated and debates will be made public.

During the WIENWOCHE the Secretariat for Ghosts, Archival Politics and Gaps organizes its first program THE MANY ARCHIVES!, which will be presented with a party and music from the Open Music Archive. Among others, the current exhibition The Brilliant and The Dark – Women and Archives, Collaboration and Reenactment, Captial and Copyleft by Eileen Simpson and Ben White, a discussion round, a workshop and a film evening will present and discuss feminist archival politics from the intersecting worlds of arts, science and activism.

Saturday, September 22, 8pm: Opening Secretariat for Ghosts, Archival Politics and Gaps
followed by the launch party with music from the Open Music Archive

Sunday, September 23, 6pm: Screening Evening
Hito Steyerl: “Journal No. 1 – An Artist Impression” (AT/DE/2007)

Journal No. 1 was released in Sarajevo, and four years after the collapse of the Communist bloc this newsreel, which has only survived on nitrate film, was lost in the confusion of the fighting in Yugoslavia. “Whenever there are no documentary images available, Steyerl employs images from fiction films produced at Sutjeska (the anti-Fascist Valter brani Sarajevo [Walter Saves Sarajevo] and Do You Remember Dolly Bell? by Emir Kusturica), without however intending to make a complete reconstruction: Multiethnic Yugoslavia remains fragmentary, both in general history and the history of film, a country between the images.” (Bert Rebhandl)

Wednesday, September 26, 6pm: Archives Spaces Histories Futurities
Lectures, followed by a discussion round on practices, investigations and archival politics in women’s and lesbian history and arts with Joana Coppi (Humboldt Universität Berlin), Li Gerhalter (Forschungsplattform Neuverortung der Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte/Sammlung Frauennachlässe, Universität Wien), Margit Hauser (STICHWORT. Archiv der Frauen- und Lesbenbewegung; i.d.a. – Dachverband der deutschsprachigen Frauen/Lesbenarchive, -bibliotheken und -dokumentationsstellen), Manuela Zechner (future archive)

Sunday, October 7, 11am–6pm: Workshop Bring In Take Out Living Archive

Workshop on feminist archival methods by Red Min(e)d

From 6pm: “Feminist Happy Hour”

Thursday, October 11, 7pm: Opening Bring In Take Out Living Archive

by Red Min(e)d

Concept and organization: Nina Höchtl and Julia Wieger

Technical support: KuKuMA – Netzwerk für Kunst-, Kultur- und Medien Alternativen