Overview
The Feminine Archives Project seeks to engage multimodal, collective practices of archiving, sense-making and memory.
Through its first instalment in July 2025, the project will host a series of workshops and an exhibition that unpack these central themes through a consideration of Virginia Woolf’s critical text, A Room of One’s Own. Woolf’s essay builds on an address that she delivered to the fellows of Newnham and Girton Colleges just short of a century ago. She asserts that for women intellectuals and artists it is a necessity to have autonomy and safety when creating – or indeed, existing at all. The project considers Woolf’s address and brings participants into multimodal conversations around their own ways of creating, the knowledge systems they inhabit, and their intellectual artistry as sites of intervention where autonomy and safety are (re)made.
Workshop Series: The participants will work with a tablecloth over the course of the three workshops. The cloth will be (re)made as spaces, imaginaries, and textualities of memory, safety, and silence that will centre the participants lived experiences and indigenous knowledge systems.
Workshop: Staining Silence The workshop draws its inspiration from Woolf’s grappling with the silences in the archives that exist around preserving and engaging with women’s intellectual and artistic works. She engaged with difficult questions around how to begin a re-membering when there is so much that has been lost and so many silences and gaps that we start with. The workshop will consist of a combination of free-write exercises that unpack the silences that we encounter in the archives, memories, selves, and spaces that we inhabit. We will transpose the themes that come up in the writing exercises into literal stains upon tablecloths that will be provided for participants to engage with the textuality of belonging, collective memory-making, and sensory archives. We will imagine the silences in archives as stains, as lingering presences that are there but not always embraced – things that are traditionally tried to wash out or erase.
Workshop: Reimagining Safety The workshop draws its inspiration from Woolf’s metaphor of the room and its lock which are complicated representations of autonomy, safety, privacy, and agency. The workshop will begin with drawing out a map of an existing or imagined room of one’s own. The participants will be invited to consider the themes of autonomy and safety in their intellectual and artistic practice and then create a map of a space that serves as an intervention in (re)making their own autonomy and safety in their practices. The workshop will proceed from this exercise to returning to the tablecloths from the previous workshop. Participants will be invited to draw/adapt their drawn maps onto their tablecloth to inscribe their imaginings of autonomy and safety onto the textuality of the cloth. These imaginings will intermingle with the stains of the previous day’s workshop around silences.
Workshop: Freedom The workshop draws its inspiration from Woolf’s final challenge, her gauntlet, that she lays down to the women fellows of Newnham and Girton that they seek financial freedom and autonomy so that they can achieve intellectual and artistic freedom. This challenge remains as valid for women of a hundred years ago as it does for women of today. The workshop will combine Woolf’s challenge with Alice Walker’s metaphor of mothers' gardens from her essay, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. Walker uses the metaphor of mothers' gardens as one in which women, specifically women of colour, engage with reclaiming practices of creativity, artistry, and intellectual pursuit in ways that are embodied, radical, and for survival. The workshop will invite participants to paint their mother's gardens, their mother’s/grandmother’s/maternal ancestor’s reclamation of creativity. From this, we will combine the painting with the tablecloth and include in its textuality this radical reclamation of both individual and collective creative practice. The cloth becomes infused with intergenerational relevance and impact in grappling with questions that have faced those before us and those present alongside us.
Details
The workshop series takes place from the 15-16 July, from 10.30-16.00 on both days.
This event is open to all and free to attend, .
Access
This event takes place in Room 12 in the Lecture Block on Sidgwick Site. The Lecture Block is a tall medium size building with 5 floors.
There is 1 main lift which can also be used as an entrance, and 2 staircases in the building.
The floors are signed as Lower Ground, Ground, 1, 2 and 3. Room 12 is located on the 3rd floor.
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