Archives and endurance: A roundtable discussion

Grassroots Artmaking coalesced into a book project through a series of online events in 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic. These discussions revealed two interlinked considerations. Firstly, the intensely polyvocal nature of the field, both in terms of the range of perspectives and approaches researchers and practitioners were taking to grassroots artistic production in the UK, and the ways in which this work was being developed, often involving close collaboration between artists, curators and researchers; direct experience of grassroots art making and organizing; and/or frequent use of interviews and oral histories to privilege a range of perspectives and experiences, a strategy associated with the radical history movement. Secondly, it became clear that archives in many different forms – not just institutional archives – played a key role in this work, but that their roles and statuses were multifarious and shifting, from the precarious and vulnerable, to the dynamic and active.
In The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor highlights the divergence between the archive as a site of state narrative-building and repressive power, and the embodied, ephemeral processes of gesture, movement and utterance that constitute a shared repertoire transmitted over generations and geographies. Taylor’s formulation, together with the vast body of thought that has theorized archival power from Jacques Derrida to Julietta Singh, rightly draws attention to the gaps and elisions in any archive, alongside tendencies to uphold and institute hegemonic histories. Equally, this roundtable seeks to explore the dynamism and reconceptualization of archival thinking that characterizes grassroots art histories, encompassing practical and conceptual considerations, and in many cases constituting what might be understood as a new form of praxis.
This roundtable has been created through two online discussions in 2023 and 2024, as well as answers sent via email by the contributors over 2024. It has been edited for flow, coherence and length.