This one day symposium seeks to consider archives as animated (as always having an ‘aliveness’, an affective force) and as requiring further orders of animation (re-readings, installations, performances). In this way we are acknowledging both the ‘vibrancy’ (Bennett) of the matter held within archives and the work needed to re-enliven or re-write those parts considered ‘dead’ or ephemeral. The animacy that Mel Y Chen writes of draws our attention to the archive as a site where stuff can be understood as too ‘dead’ or too ‘live’ via the traditions of perception, memory, language and/or national, heteronormative or colonial discourse.

We are interested in archives of so called ephemera, of queerness, of single objects, and of ‘living history’.  We hope to hear about those collections like those of human remains that demand more than careful preservation and thoseshifting archives that are produced when we create a new approach, work across disciplines or fall into an altered state such as love or sickness.

This symposium is being held by the Cultural Materialities Research Program within the Transforming Cultures Research Centre, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.