Awkward Archives

Jonas Tinius and Margareta von Oswald together with Archive Books and SAVVY Contemporary invite you cordially to the launch of a modular, teachable curriculum about awkward archives – archives that cause disquieting frictions and sit uncomfortably in the contemporary world. These drafts comprise a series of site-based pedagogic modules, which depart from conversations with archivists who let their unease with the archives become a productive, troubling heuristic. Each module is devised for teaching and reflection on anthropology, collections, organisations, and modalities of fieldwork.

For this iteration, the curriculum’s editors Jonas Tinius and Margareta von Oswald are joined by several contributors and interlocutors for the curriculum, in order of appearance in the book and with the archives on which spoke about with them – Bernd Scherer (formerly HKW), Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock (SAVVY Contemporary), Hannes Hacke (Naomi Wilzig Art Collection, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Yann LeGall (The Restitution of Knowledge research project, Technische Universität zu Berlin), Stefan Aue and Lama El Khatib (Nomadic Curriculum Manual Series), and Chiara Figone (Archive Books).