LIVING ARCHIVE

Course Description

How do artists document their practice? What parts of a studio practice are archived? How do we document collaboration? How can oral history play a role in art practice? How does a living archive exist and evolve with a given subject? In this 10 week course, students will work collaboratively to create an ethnographic archive of their own studio practices. Together students will play a dual role of artist and archivist, maintaining a studio practice while orienting their work inside of The Archive.

Through collaboration, students will help each other create an archival folder for their practice, considering what gets recorded, what gets left out, and what is fabricated for the context of the archive. This course will build on students’ practices with print and film media production, oral and written interviews, and collaborative conversations.

Students will learn about archival processes through oral history recording practices, theories of archival gaps, and historical speculation examples in historical, art historical, political, queer and feminist studies, decolonize studies, and print and film media. There will be a field trip to Special Collections to look at the artists' books collection, the College of Creative Studies archive, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Contemporary art’s archive. The course will read through Walter Benjamin’s aura theory, Lynda Sexson’s “Boxes” chapter in The Ordinarily Sacred, and Speaking of the Self: Gender, Performance, and Autobiography in South Asia by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Anshu Malhotra among other texts.

Interested students should contact Lucy at llbell@ucsb.edu with 3 images of their work with descriptions, and a short paragraph of interest or artist statement.