In this online closing panel for Dragging the Archive, the 8th Annual Live at the Library exhibition collaboration between Pratt Institute Library and Franklin Furnace, curator Elly Clarke reviewed the 3-month run of the exhibition and live events. Dragging the Archive events included a live remake of the first-ever Franklin Furnace / Pseudo Studio live Netcast by Halona Hilbertz, 25 years later to the day; a trans-Atlantic, trans-institutional collaboration between students from Pratt Institute and Goldsmiths College, University of London; a workshop on how to read archival materials, and a Virtual Tour of the exhibition, which will live online in perpetuity.
Elly was joined at this event by founding director Martha Wilson; Pratt archivist Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez; Professor Kim Bobier, artist Halona Hilbertz, and designer Yunjia Yuan.
The exhibition runs through 6th April and is online in perpetuity at https://franklinfurnace.org/dragging-the-archive
Video documentation of the March 28, 2023, 3-4pm ET event of Dragging the Archive: Closing Panel. Recorded on Zoom, edited by Xinan Ran
Dragging the Archive is an online/onsite exhibition by artist Elly Clarke of materials from the early cyber years of Franklin Furnace, 1996-2002. Installed in heavy museum-like vitrines across all levels of the Pratt Library, the show is to be encountered in any order, (pro)posing a starting point rather than an end. This ex:position is an invitation: to discuss. To encounter. To reflect. And to be involved: by writing, by posting, by augmenting the text/s by zooming in via the QR codes that will give greater clarity to the fade of the fax, the detail of the slides, the YES / NO / YES notes scribbled on the edge of a rejected proposal dug out from deep storage, and grants a voice to the person who encounters it. In physics, drag is a force that pulls in two directions at once: forwards, and back; up, and down. It is also both a performance – with the possibility of transformation – and a burden, or resistance. Within the context of this archive, how to hold this tension? How to re:present evidence of a time, an event, a happening, a performance – as well as the major institutional shift taken by Franklin Furnace at this time – out of the physical and digital matter that remains?
Participant Bios
Kim Bobier
Kim Bobier specializes in modern and contemporary periods. Her practice emphasizes critical race art history and the politics of representation, especially through the lens of Black studies and gender and sexuality studies. She harnessed these perspectives in her dissertation,
“Representing and Refracting the Civil Rights Movement in Late Twentieth-Century Art.” Bobier is the recipient of fellowships from institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, the Mellon Black Metropolis Research Consortium, and the Luce American Council of Learned Societies. Her writing appears in Afterimage, African Arts Journal, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Art Journal, International Review of African American Art, Panorama: Association of Historians of American Art, Routledge’s anthology Social Practice Art in Turbulent Times, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on the book project Monitoring and Modeling Citizenship: Racializing Surveillance and the Body Politic in Contemporary Art. Most recently she co-edited Women & Performance’s special issue “Views from the Larger Somewhere: Race, Vision, and Surveillance”.
Elly Clarke
Elly Clarke is an artist interested in the performance and burden (‘the drag’) of the physical body and object in a digitally mediated world. She explores this through photography, screengrabs, video, music, writing, community-based projects and #Sergina – a multi-bodied, border-straddling drag queen who, across one body and several, sings and performs online and offline about love, lust and loneliness (and data discharge) in the mesh of hyper-dis/connection. Clarke’s work has been shown at venues that include Kiasma, Helsinki; Galerie Wedding, Berlin; mac Birmingham; the Banff Centre and the Lowry, Salford Quays.
Now, in collaboration and sometimes competition with her alter ego #Sergina, Clarke is doing a practice-led PhD at Goldsmiths London, examining the ‘Drag of Physicality in the Digital Age’, in which she is proposing drag as a potential mode and method of resistance to the feedback loop of bodies and data, and the constant tracking and tracing of identities in a capitalist surveillance context.
Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez
Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez is the Virginia Thoren and Institute Archivist at Pratt Institute Libraries and Visiting Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute School of Information. Prior to joining Pratt, Cristina was a National Digital Stewardship Resident for Art Information at the Maryland Institute College of Art’s Decker Library. Cristina’s work is focused on the application of social justice principles to archival practice through participatory and non-hierarchical ways of knowledge-seeking and making. She is a founding member of Archivistas en Espanglish, a collective dedicated to amplifying spaces of memory-building between Latin America and Latinx communities in the US and currently co-runs Barchives, an independent outreach initiative that brings archivists to bars to talk about New York City’s archival collections and local history. She holds a BA in Geography from Universidad de Puerto Rico and an MLS with a certificate in Archives and Preservation of Cultural Materials from CUNY Queens College.
Halona Hilbertz
Born in Austin, Texas to German parents, Halona Hilbertz moved to Munich, Germany, at 8 years of age, later to Düsseldorf. Studied Painting and Performance Art at Hochschule der Bildenden Kuenste Saar, Saarbruecken, Germany, and at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Canada. Moved to New York City in 1996. Halona makes objects and collages. Her work has been included in various group and solo shows in Germany, France, Canada, China, the UAE and the United States. Halona co-founded Full Tank, an all-female experimental band with all original songs; her current band is Fetzig, also a DIY band. She lives in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.
Martha Wilson
Martha Wilson (American, b. 1947) is a Feminist artist and gallery director, founding the non-profit Franklin Furnace in 1976 and continuing to run it to this day. Notably working in photography and performance, Wilson uses costume and role-play to explore female subjectivity and challenge societal norms. Her work gained attention in part thanks to curator and critic Lucy R. Lippard, who recognized Wilson’s contributions to Conceptual and Feminist art.
Wilson’s work has been exhibited by P.P.O.W gallery, A.I.R. Gallery, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many more. She is also a member of musical performance group DISBAND, which was active in New York from 1978 to 1982 and reunited at P.S.1 in 2008, in conjunction with the major museum retrospective Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution.
Yunjia Yuan
Yunjia is a graphic designer based in lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY) and came from Shanghai, China. She believes in the power of design to drive things forward, for both utilitarian purposes and conceptual inquiries. In her free time, she enjoys melding design, writing, and interactive media to reveal everyday normalcy, surveillance, and power.
Dragging the Archive is curated by Elly Clarke. Exhibition identity is designed by Yunjia Yuan. Live at the Library VIII is presented with the support of Michael Asher Foundation; The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; The New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; Pratt Institute; The Silicon Valley Community Foundation; and the Board of Directors, members, and friends of Franklin Furnace Archive.
