Archival Workshops

Jen Everett makes photographs, installations, and time-based media that engage relationships between rupture, Black interiority, and knowledge production. For Counterpublic 2023, Everett has developed a series of workshops born out of a desire for thinking and working together to preserve as well as activate the materials we collect, handle, care for, and eventually pass on to those we love and trust. These workshops focus on the grounding and fortifying power of vernacular archives explored in photographic, sonic, and ecological modalities.

Collaborative facilitators will guide learners through strategies for record-keeping and preservation while highlighting differences between institutional and vernacular frameworks with a focus on the practices of informal archivists and keepers within our own families and communities, subverting the myth of the institutional archive as the source of true or official knowledge. This offering will center histories that have been suppressed, omitted, or are at risk of being lost.

Participants gathered at Profield Reserve for an interactive workshop on the power of sound, where they discussed how music and sonics hold memory and narratives across time and space. They listened and thought together about how sound is passed down in families and communities and how sonics map the history of a place. Victoria Donaldson, owner of Northside Soul record shop shared her experiences as a DJ and keeper of sound, and composed a collaborative mix with attendees. After the workshop, participants enjoyed spins by the Sage DJ collective and vending by Northside Soul.

The public joined together at the Green Roof Pavilion of the Metropolitan Sewer District Headquarters to honor/heal the water, water systems, and Mississippi River through sound art and ritual, led by Dail Chambers. In this site-specific ekphrastic response, Chambers encapsulated the movement of people, water, and nature through sound.

Hosted by the George B. Vashon Museum, participants learned and shared strategies for record keeping and preservation while highlighting differences between institutional and vernacular frameworks. They focused on the practices of informal archivists and keepers* within their families and communities, subverting the myth of the institutional archive as the sole source of true or official knowledge. This offering centered histories that have been suppressed, omitted, or are at risk of being lost.

*Keepers: The ones in our families and communities who we rely on to preserve and hold our history. Whether this is the family tree, photographs, record collection, garden, etc.

Guiding Questions:

Rather than focusing exclusively on distant futures, how can we appreciate and work with archival photographs in the present? How can this material help us during uncertain times?
How do we practice care for ourselves and others when working with vernacular photographs?
How do we make peace with what will inevitably decay and break down? How do we honor what resists retelling or being recorded?

Sonic Archive with Victoria Donaldson

Ecology Archive with Dail Chambers

Photographic Archive