narratives as spaces

SOMA ARCHIVES Intro Text Long Version

SOMA ARCHIVES collectively creates counter archives from a non-ableist and somatic perspective. The archives aim to be a place in which social agency and activist resistance are emerging through community-based artistic and archival practices that are connected to a politics of care and body fragility. This project is part of the exhibition Sicktopia, in the series Echoing Futures: On practices of radical imagination at ACUD MACHT NEU gallery in Berlin. SOMA ARCHIVES is being facilitated by members of Sickness Affinity Group (SAG).

SOMA ARCHIVES draws inspiration from the archives of the present (Antonio Lafuente) and the Archive of Feelings (Ann Cvetkovich). The first one places the communal before the functional and the affective before the controllable: "It's not just about understanding and sharing what happens, but what happens specifically to us, to the community". The second trusts in ephemera and all kinds of materials generated by a community as a proof of evidence of individual and collective lives. Both archives do not separate the archival components from the community that produces them, but affirm the community as creators and owners of these archives.

How might an archive that embodies trauma and affect avoid morbidity and voyeuristic gazes? How can fragility and care be articulated as mutual support and visibility? How are the members of the community included as makers of the archive? How do gestures, emotions and narratives inscribed in the body become archived? How is documentation approached with fluidity and non-fixedness?

May this archive create space for our experiences of illness, disability or chronic health conditions, as well as our feelings, thoughts, doubts, traumas, fears, desires and joys connected to them. May it denounce the intersectional discrimination we have experienced within the medical-industrial system, the arts and culture sector and academia.  May it provide solace, illustrate our crip time and everyday rituals, and give voice to our traumas without naming them. May it celebrate our failures and un/learnings, our mutual support, our emancipatory moments and our community life.

With SOMA ARCHIVES, we aim to:

• Challenge the definition of the term archive from a non-ableist and somatic perspective.

• Subvert the canonical ways of thinking about data, documents, classification policies, taxonomies and hierarchies in the archive through artistic and collaborative processes.

• Rely on interdependence and collective thinking to counter the violence of erasure, silencing and institutionalization experienced by the communities involved.

• Allow the community to reinterpret their own documents in an open and dynamic process, and to decide how to preserve their experiences, memory and identity.

• Give visibility to crip and queer temporalities of ways of working that resist the expected productivity of healthy bodies in the art landscape.

In both May and June, we held 2-day gatherings of workshops and activities related to the aims of the project. In July, we held an online conversation to culminate the processes of the gatherings. We offered asynchronous online versions of workshop prompts, creating accessibility to people who couldn’t join in person.

We created an accessible and cozy space by bringing blankets, various seats, hot water bottles, yoga mats, soft light lamps and plants. A bunch of stimming toys were waiting for our hands and bodies in a nice box. We kindly asked people entering the space to do a Covid rapid test, whenever their body-minds allowed them to drop in. We decided together which day wearing masks was needed and a big bottle of disinfectant solution was always ready. Tea, coffee, fruits and snacks were available all days throughout. We prepared and shared home made vegan food together, eating outside in the garden when the weather was nice. We also transformed another space into a rest room with more blankets, some calming music, stimming toys and a daybed.

At the beginning of each day we opened a space for check-in and housekeeping information. We shared the access concept we conceived for those days, based on the access needs communicated by all. We took turns volunteering for the Accessicorn that Lucie Schroeder introduced to us (inspired by crip parties in London that invited access doulas and consenticorns, first introduced by New York based crip hosts). The Accessicorn is a rotating role that offers small gestures of care (making tea, opening windows), holds an awareness of the group dynamics (asymmetries, needs for breaks) and serves as a first contact person for emerging individual access needs. The Assessicorn either wore a cap or a sash to be identified.

We began our gatherings by grieving for those under military or ecocide violence, especially victims of ongoing genocides with the Grief and Genocide Acknowledgment. We proposed community agreements which were evolving and changing each day, and aspired to create a space where people can feel safer and express their feelings. We each got a notebook to write down thoughts, ideas or just doodles while being, feeling, thinking and resonating together.

We started every day slowly, honoring our crip time. We listened to the energies of our body-minds and were open to moving through our planned schedule as needed and desired. We did a care ritual each day, which took the form of a collective meditation with a caring focus, and an invitation to react to them in the most accessible way.

Through facilitating workshops we imagined our dream archives (Archiving the Present), thought about objects, sounds, gestures and rituals that accompany our daily life and help us to cope with our flares and conditions (This is [not] an Archive), explored our touch senses (Touch Journal), translated our stories into clay forms with prompts (Objects of Re-collection), weaved collectively with different materials, reflecting on our polyphonic access needs and forms of expressions (On Collective Archival Practices).

We had conversations about the future archive, its content, its form, and its accessibility features. We shared about the last archive we have been to, what makes it an archive, and how our bodies felt while we were there. We thought about who our archive will be for, how we would feel represented, and how to crip archive practices. We asked ourselves how to hold the tensions of archiving and what are our fears and hopes for future archives, including this archive.

We aimed to keep the gatherings accessible and are still learning about our gaps and mistakes when access needs were not met. We acknowledged the pain, frustration or anger we may have caused and experienced ourselves, honoring and welcoming them as part of this learning process. We created an environment of collective access, where we all contribute to supporting each other with our needs. We welcomed and listened to constructive feedback about how our accessibility could be improved.

We created an organization team to coordinate and brainstorm all activities and proposals for the SOMA ARCHIVES installation. Soon we became the orca team, adopting an orca as a symbol of swimming elegantly through deep waters, inspired by a text by Alexis Pauline Gumbs about a female orca we read together. We met once a week during the whole process, opening our meetings with a check-in and care ritual honoring our work, time and our limitations. We made agendas and protocols for each meeting. We expressed our feelings regularly about the working process adapting the rhythm and workload to honor our capacities. We had check-ins in the orca group on how we see the group process with all participants growing and where it felt like it needed a different tone.

We decided together which materials we felt comfortable sharing in the exhibition and how they should be presented. We discussed the accessibility features for the materials in the exhibition by making them accessible for at least two senses, calling this Messy Access. By choosing this “messy access”, we opened different access modes for each piece, acknowledging the complexity of creating access for diverse body-minds with limited time, energy and resources. We aim to show that access is always in process (e.g. by inviting the visitors to contribute to translations into different languages or mediums or by sharing how accessible the archive was for them). An access team made proposals to the participants about how their materials and contributions could be accessed by the people who will enter the exhibition, reviewed our web and print items, and managed contacting translators. A design team proposed ideas for the exhibition design, print materials and web concept in close contact with the materials we generated in our gatherings and conversations after.

Contributors:

Soma Archives aims to collectively create counter archives from a non-ableist and somatic perspective. It has been created through participatory and community-based archival practices as a counterpoint of canonical and institutional archiving processes.

Soma Archives is a project of Sickness Affinity Group, initiated by Maria Morata with Noah Gokul, Lo Moran, Lisa Ness and Lucie Schroeder.

Workshop concepts: Noah Gokul, Yon Natalie Mik, Lo Moran, Maria Morata, Lisa Ness

Concept and coordination of asynchronous online workshops: Lucie Schroeder

Installation: RC Taube, Almitra Pyritidis and Lo Moran

Website: Iz Paehr and RC Taube

Graphic Design: Iz Paehr

Accessibility concept: Lisa Ness, Noah Gokul, Lo Moran and Almitra Pyritidis

Translation: Lucie Schroeder (coordination, German), Yara Abbas (Arabic), Dana Cermane (DGS), Gris García (Spanish), Marieke Helmke (German), Maria Morata (Spanish), Lisa Ness (German), Merve Asya Özgür (Turkish), Almitra Pyritidis (German), nat skoczylas (Polish) and Maarja Veisson (Estonian), Kani Lent (German)

Proofreading: Lo Moran (coordination), Noah Gokul, Lisa Ness, Almitra Pyritidis, Lucie Schroeder

Archivist/Activists: with Jùlia Ayerbe, Fran Breden, Noah Gokul, Yon Natalie Mik, Lo Moran, Maria Morata, Lisa Ness, Iz Paehr, RC Taube, Nir Salom, Lucie Schroeder, Christina Zück, Almitra Pyritidis and Weaving Contributors Kae Ilo Maris Eichel, ioana ferariu, noël, Nara Rosetto, Sina, Hannah Tatjes and Milena (Miles) Wendt

Thanks and Acknowledgements:

Thank you to Interflugs who allowed us to use their spaces at the University of the Arts Berlin: Salma Salem, Dalis Pacheco and to Fran Breden.

Thank you to ACUD team: Alžbeta Čermáková, Miriam Döring, Linnea Meiners

And to all other people who helped us realize this project.