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The Co-Writing Booth: Voicing Archives

The archives at Manchester Art Gallery's Platt Hall function for us as a set of conditions for arts-based research. Working independently and collaboratively, we engage with archival objects, records, systems, the building itself and its community and surroundings, regarding the archive less as a static repository and more as a site for activation and enactment. We are interested in the political ways that embodied and material approaches can challenge archival authority, and how performance can activate archival material differently, unsettling claims of coherence and single truths.

We propose a durational collective performance set in a co-writing booth (Fig 1) in a suitably quiet space. Delegates are invited to drop in to observe and write in response to an arrangement of archival material related to Platt Hall, alongside their own reflections arising from the conference. Emerging through shared authorship, delegates are also invited to perform their contributions within a 10-minute plenary summing up the day. In the performance, we collectively voice the situated archive, drawing on our conference context-specific plurality of tone, accent, rhythm and intonation. Through this process we emphasise the written word voiced as a practice for challenging the presumed truth of archival records.

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