Yuhan/Echo Zheng
Maintenance as a Practice of Care in Archival Labour
Summary
keywords: archival labour, maintenance, care, underground, gathering
Through engaging professionally and creatively with archival labour, this practice-based research utilises work experiences within archives and takes the underground (the space below ground) as an alternative perspective through reflective and autotheoretical practices, and aims to reflect on the doubled invisibility of both the archives and archival work, thus the archival workers, and contribute to making visible the labour of maintenance and care. It is situated within the context of maintenance as a practice of care in which the knowledge and knowers have been undervalued, as well as an expanded understanding of archives as places of retrieval, revelation and reconstruction where maintenance takes place. By being with archives, thus sometimes underground and engaging with different tasks such as accessioning, metadata logging and digitising and repackaging, it can generate a collection of materials reflecting on the conditions and textures of archival work as well as time and space underground. Included in this thesis are my practice of working in the Conway Library of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Guardian News and Media Archive and the output that follows in forms of photo documentation, self-publication, moving images and creative writing through gathering and editing.
Additional info
Echo/Yuhan is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily with time-based media such as moving image, text and sound. Their practice-based research investigates an expanded understanding of maintenance in the context of archival practices, where they engage themselves with work and labour within archives, think about underground time and space, practice reflective writing and recycle visual materials. They are part of an artist collective 河边哼歌 Hebianhengge and had previously exhibited at Queer Circle, Southwark Park Gallery and Safehouse I. They live and work in London and hold a degree in Fine Art Photography.
‘Scan of Sticker Backing Paper, All of 13, April 2023’ from the GNM Archive (2023) collection
Archival work/labour, carried from the expanded understanding of archival practices, refers to all work carried out in archives, collections and places where collection (gathering), organisation (processing) and preservation (maintaining) of materials take place. This potentially includes places from analogue and digital archives and personal collections to bookcases, folders and boxes of objects. In most parts of this thesis, it is used to describe some practicalities involved in archives of different kinds, including institu- tional, corporate, personal archives and more.
Maintenance here is an expanded concept that refers to mending, reusing and repurposing. Generally, it is the practice of upkeep. It opposes the idea that things perform automatically and independently (Benefento, 2019, p. 3), and reflects on the fact that maintenance is almost always invisible until the breakdown of ob- jects and systems. Archives are places where the maintenance of information and materials happens. To care is to be thinking of, tending to, spending time with, and extending one’ s boundaries to comprehend/ embrace/learn something. Together, maintenance and care are entry points of feelings and perspectives just as they are analytical frameworks for making visible. In the context of expanded archival practices, people who engage with archival work and labour are maintainers and caretakers.
Overburden Blast (2023) is a juxtaposition of found footage showing an overburden blast and a paragraph explaining the backlog in archives. The decision to slow down the footage many times was motivated by its narrational tension. By delaying the moment of the explosion, slowing it down to a moderate but still violent and unpredictable level, it invites the viewers to anticipate the uncertainty and imagine the moment of 'failure' and 'disruption'. As an initial understanding and reflection on the concept and position of the backlog, as well as an emotional digestion of the backlog's prevalent existence in the archive, it is distant, reserved and contained, reflecting the beginning of my archival work experience when I was more of an observer than a participant. While this moving image is effective when conveying these ideas, looking back, it lacks recognisable personal input that ties it together, which is a valuable reminder for me to make time and take time to experience and explore archival work consistently.
In the months that followed, with more exposure to archives and underground spaces, I created No Sudden Revelation (2023) to explore the underground as a perspective in the context of archival work. Inspired by my notes taken while and after working in archives, the structure of this narrative draws on mining and cave exploring, as well as my sensory experience and reflections of working in underground archives, to depict a slice of the narrator’s experience of exploring a fictional underground cave. The undocumented archival work prompted me not to write directly about its practicalities, but to highlight a sense of distance from the object of action, without a cause and effect of what happens, only an intermediate process that is iterated as a constant. Instead of creating a sustained and erotetic narrative (Carroll, 2021, p. 151), guided by the implied directional movements from exploring the cave, I described a detached solitude and closure: the soil and rocks that are dug up, kept, discarded, turned over, transported and left behind; and the unexplored time and space not bounded by the human scale. Using found footage from the Internet Archive and Youtube, paired with camera shutter sounds and white noise I recorded during digitisation work, the moving image is a practice of gathering as archiving that features shots focusing on detailed textures of minerals and vast landscapes, visually constitutes a slow and sinking movement across material, location and time. The dynamics of the different found footage, their speed and associated temporalities are manipulated and edited together into a coherent image, a process that emphasises multiple perspectives and distances, i.e., the conscious combination of found footage texture, time and point-of-view editing, and first-person but contextually uninformative script to construct a sense of distant intimacy and mismatch, grafting the two together. This slowness permeates from the archival labour to the derivative material, works and activities associated with it, annotating, translating and paraphrasing it.
ASAP (as slow as possible) (2023)
read it here
I collected a few videos from the internet that relate to archival work based on my work experience and selected frames of archival workers in contact with archival materials, focusing on hand movements such as moving archive boxes and documents and flipping through them to display a degree of the haptics and textures involved in archival labour. I then arranged the still frames of these videos vertically in the order in which they occurred, in two side-by-side columns, one with the archival material as the reference point and the other with the hand as the reference point. By comparing the two columns with shifting contours, the neglected slow archival work and body movement are made more visible. Accompanied with the still images are notes I took while volunteering in archives and afterwards of discoveries, thoughts and questions. By including them in this zine with the still frames, I hope to document, recreate and approximate a pleasurable and meaningful work experience I have been having that is usually not directly recorded. Further, this small publication is printed on yellowed newsprint paper, which refers to fragile archive records that need to be handled with care. Its highly workable form and way of arranging stills also leave space for it to potentially expand into a larger collection with time and experience.
