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Activating
our Archives
Platforming artists' work as part of a multi-media project
Background
Activating our Archives is a yearly project led by photographer and curator Sunil Shah in collaboration with Modern Art Oxford and community charity Fusion Arts. Each year, Activating our Archives works with a group of adults to produce work using dialogue, photography, storytelling, social media and live archiving to explore a particular theme. The participants interact and share and develop their work through an assortment of in-person and online workshops as well as digital platforms.
In 2021, Activating our Archives participants explored themes of protest and play, inspired by artist Samson Kambalu's New Liberia exhibition at Modern Art Oxford.
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During Activating our Archives 2021, I was Fusion Arts' Digital Marketing, Communications and PR Manager. It was my role to work with the communications team at Modern Art Oxford (MAO) to share the development and outcomes of the project with our online audiences.
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Brief
"We need to promote awareness of and engagement with Activating our Archives
online as well as to share and platform participants' work. Can you help?"
Process
Before Activating our Archives 2021 started, the in-person participants signed a visual recording policy consenting to photographic documentation of themselves and their work during the six sessions. Participants also consented to this material being shared for promotional and educational purposes, and were given the option to share their social media handles if they wished.
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The project kicked off at MAO with a tour of Samson Kambalu's New Liberia exhibition. The work was used as a springboard to discuss forms of protest and play. Using photos taken during this session, myself and MAO's communications team shared this project introduction with our respective social media audiences.
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Session two was an online conversation between project leader Sunil Shah and the Magnum photographer Sim Chi Yin. In the session they discussed the themes of history, memory, and migration in Chi Yin's work and spoke about the project's potential for examining the personal and the political through photography and digital archiving. I created simple but effective flyer and banner designs that made use of a dramatic pre-existing press shot of Chi Yin. These materials were then used to create an event sign up page, list the event on various web platforms, promote it on social media and as a holding image on Zoom, making for a cohesive, consistent and recognisable campaign.
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Left: event flyer; middle: event banner; right: social media post using the flyer
Both Fusion and MAO promoted the event widely using a mix of paid-for and organic social posts, as the aim of the event was to get as many non-local people as possible participating. I was also in charge of setting the event up as a seminar on Zoom; recording, editing and uploading it to Fusion's YouTube channel for those who missed the original broadcast.
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Sim Chi Yin and Sunil Shah in conversation
The remaining four sessions took place at the Fusion Arts Centre. In sessions three and four, participants started putting ideas into practice and experimenting using photography, film, digital images, collage and other media to explore forms of self-expression, emotion and individuality within their personal archives.
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In session five, the participants worked together to create a collective archive of the Fusion Arts Centre using a variety of processes including photography, scanning, editing, video recording, illustration and painting. The group investigated the array of quirky objects from past and present projects stored onsite, as well as the interesting, unusual and defining features the Fusion building and yard.
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In the final session of Activating our Archives, the participants came together to present and discuss the work they had been developing over the past six weeks, with interesting contrasts and parallels emerging from the discussion. Following this, the participants assembled a display of their independent project work as well as the group archive of Fusion Arts. The group's family members, friends and curious members of the public were then invited to view this pop-up exhibition, and come and chat to the artists.â €
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Snapshots from the sessions
To keep the public and remote participants connected with the project, I worked alongside MAO's communications team to share updates from the sessions and Padlet page (used by local and remote participants to keep in touch and share ideas between sessions) via social media, newsletters and Fusion Arts' website. To maximise discoverability, all posts pertaining to the project made use of relevant hashtags including the pre-established #ActivatingOurArchives tag, which had been used to categorise and share work since the project's 2019 launch. Participants who had shared their social media details were tagged in relevant posts / stories to help them gain exposure and allow them to share the content. A selection of remote participants sharing their work using the project hashtag were also featured on Fusion Arts' Instagram stories. Once the project sessions had wrapped up, I used Instagram stories to invite users to access the Activating our Archives Padlet page, and wrote blog and project entries on Fusion's website summarising the project process and findings.
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The final session revealed some really impressive, complex and thought-provoking pieces, with many participants continuing to develop their work after the project had ended. In the following weeks, the #ActivatingOurArchives Instagram hashtag and project Padlet page remained active. Sensing this continuation of activity, myself and MAO's communications team decided that an engaging way to do justice to the participants' developing archives, provoke further conversation and evolution, and help share their work and practice would be to arrange individual Instagram takeovers for each consenting artist, showcasing a selection of their project pieces across both organisations' pages. Although tied together by a focus on personal archives and protest and play, the takeover theme, content and duration varied from person to person. Some artists provided written explanations, while others preferred to discuss their pieces face-to-face. Others still wrote answers to a series of directed questions, and some even preferred to let the work speak for itself, providing no extra context. Our role was somewhat curatorial; we arranged posts according to information provided by the artist, making order and layout decisions in line with the work's narrative or lack thereof. Where relevant, each post included links to the artist's Instagram page and website to aid the audience's discovery journey. Image descriptions were also included to improve the accessibility of the work.
Posts were shared alternatively across each organisation's account at regular intervals (using engagement data to identify optimal posting times), with each post signposting to the next. Each takeover was bolstered by corresponding Instagram stories. Between October 2021 and January 2022, six artists were featured across the two Instagram pages.
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"Memory and time are not linear and we can implant false memories over time for very individual reasons. Ultimately, I’d like to make my story and pass the baton on for the viewer to run off in all directions of their own..."
- Extract from artist Amanda Denny's takeover
Part of Amanda Denny's takeover
Featured artists included Amanda Denny, whose work uses image and text to explore (re)imagined and non-linear narratives, Heidi Kawai Smith, whose work focuses on memories of taste and smell in relation to her Hong Kong heritage, and Seeun Kim, whose pieces explore forms of social communication at a time when our means of connection and dialogue have been significantly altered. â €
Part of Heidi Kawai Smith's takeover
Results
Activating our Archives 2021 has had a wide reach. There were eight in-person participants and at least an additional 5 people participating remotely via Padlet. On Instagram there are over 3,000 posts using the #ActivatingOurArchive hashtag, many of which were shared during the 2021 run of the project by local and international participants alike.
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The A Conversation With event attracted 85 attendees during its broadcast and has gained an additional 30 views on YouTube. Fusion's web blog and project entries have attained a total of 122 clicks, whilst the portion of the Instagram takeovers on Fusion's page gained a total of 549 engagements and had a good average engagement rate of 4.3% per post.
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There were a total of 836 views on Fusion's takeover-related Instagram stories and a total of 49 click throughs to takeover artists' websites from Linktree.
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In addition, the digital coverage of the project and subsequent takeovers garnered lots of positive feedback both in-person and online, with users commenting on how "intriguing" and "impressive" the work was, and asking the featured artists further questions about the pieces.
Takeover viewer comments