Program

Agenda

Time	Agenda Item
9:00AM – 9:30AM	Doors open
9:30AM – 9:45AM	Welcome Remarks with Dr. Almudena Escobar López and Dr. Kathleen Pirrie Adams
9:45AM – 11:00AM	Panel 1 – Wandering Through Archival Possibility
11:00AM – 11:15AM	Break
11:15AM – 12:30PM	Panel 2 – Institutional Interventions: Archives, Collections, and Curatorial Negotiation
12:30PM – 1:30PM	Lunch Break
1:30PM – 2:45PM	Panel 3 – In Process: Process Cinema, Material Practice, and Archival Atmospheres
2:45PM – 3:00PM	Break
3:00PM – 4:30PM	Closing Summary
4:30PM – 6:00PM	Facilities Tours

The Archive is Creative: Artistic Interventions brings together artists, curators, and scholars to explore how creative practices reframe archival work in a colonial present—one marked by uneven access, fractured records, and the lingering force of institutional authority. Rather than treating archives as fixed repositories, the symposium asks: How are archives actively made? How is material accessed, withheld, or transformed through artistic process? And why do these questions matter now?

Participants work across a wide range of materials and methods: moving-image practices that linger with fragments; object- and image-based research that destabilizes classification systems; tactile and ephemeral forms such as bread-making that reconsider how knowledge is carried or transmitted; and interdisciplinary approaches that restructure how images, objects, and documents circulate. This diversity underscores that archival meaning does not reside in the object alone, but in the gestures, viewpoints, and durations through which artists engage it.

Foregrounding process over product, the symposium examines how wandering, attention, proximity, and repetition open new interpretive possibilities. It considers how artists navigate and reconfigure institutional frameworks; how they surface partial histories without resolving them; and how they challenge the narrative authority that archives often claim. By emphasizing the labour, uncertainty, and inventive methodologies embedded in creative research, the gathering invites a reconsideration of the archive as an evolving site—shaped as much by perspective and method as by the materials themselves.

Across three panels, The Archive is Creative asks how artistic and curatorial strategies can unsettle inherited narratives, expand what becomes legible, and reimagine the archive as a place of possibility within ongoing colonial conditions.

Panel 1 — Wandering Through Archival Possibility

Participants: Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko

Moderator: Dr. Almudena Escobar López

This panel considers how artists approach archives through slow, open-ended methods that invite wandering, attention, and proximity. Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko reflect on how moving around archival materials, rather than seeking to resolve them, can surface partial memories, unstable histories, and overlooked relationships. Positioned within a postcolonial moment, the panel asks: Why revisit archives this way today? What can non-extractive, collaborative practices reveal about how histories are constructed or obscured? And how might lingering with fragments challenge inherited narratives and expand what counts as knowledge? By foregrounding uncertainty and porousness, the panel explores how artists reimagine the archive as a site of possibility rather than authority.

Panel 2 — Institutional Interventions: Archives, Collections, and Curatorial Negotiation

Participants: Luis Jacob, Sameer Farooq, Sophie Hackett

Moderator:  Evan Pavka, Assistant Professor at the School of Interior Design at TMU

Together, the panel considers how artistic, curatorial, and scholarly actions can reorient institutional memory today: How do postcolonial interventions unsettle the logics through which collections are assembled, interpreted, and preserved? What forms of care, refusal, or reimagining become possible when archives are treated as living sites rather than static repositories? By mapping strategies that move between material intervention, collaborative research, and structural critique, the panel addresses why transforming institutional archives remains urgent in the present moment. This panel foregrounds methodological approaches, mapping a spectrum of strategies that open archival structures to new forms of engagement and interpretation.

Panel 3 — In Process: Process Cinema, Material Practice, and Archival Atmospheres

Participants: Crystal Z. Campbell, Timothy Yanick Hunter,  Dr. Janine Marchessault

Moderator: Dr. Almudena Escobar López

This panel considers how artists engage archives through the lens of process cinema—a practice that treats film, media, and material inquiry as ongoing, experimental procedures rather than fixed forms. Process cinema emphasizes duration, tactility, and the way meaning emerges through sustained interaction with materials and research.

Building on this approach, the panel asks: How are archives made? How is material accessed or withheld? How do our positions as viewers shape what we can perceive? By shifting attention from the archival object to the viewpoints through which it is encountered, the panelists reveal archives as dynamic environments in which history surfaces slowly and partially, generating atmospheric conditions that shape how the past becomes legible. Working across moving image, sculpture, installation, and archival investigation, the panelists approach archives as dynamic and responsive environments. Rather than extracting information from historical materials, their practices unfold through cycles of return, reworking, and sustained attention to what archives reveal slowly, partially, or indirectly. This iterative, process-focused approach generates what can be understood as archival atmospheres: relational and affective conditions that shape how history becomes perceptible.