Vancouver Independent
Archives Week

Recollective

Info

Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week (2018-2021) was a series of free public events, panels, conversations, and screenings that highlighted artist-run centre archives, artists working with archives, and the intersections between contemporary art practices and social movements in Vancouver and abroad. The program featured perspectives and approaches to archival practices through grassroots strategies, collective organizing, hybrid models, DIY spaces, open source / shared solutions, and counter-archives that facilitate ownership of community memory by and for community. This event series emphasized the reciprocal influence between contemporary culture and social movements by drawing attention to shared experiences and struggles across diverse communities.

The Recollective program significantly expanded on the work begun through the previous archival projects: “Activating the Archive” and “Vancouver Independent Archives Week.” Taking the focus and format of these projects as a starting point, Recollective broadened the context, understanding, and awareness of independent archives by exploring what is at stake when artists and arts organizations confront the tasks of arranging, describing, preserving, and providing access to material history.

In its later years of programming, Recollective looked beyond Vancouver to host a series of national and international presenters and respondents to examine these issues in a range of global contexts. Presenting organizations invited a variety of artists, writers, and activists to create critical responses to Recollective events and their responses have been added to this website to extend access to wider audiences.

Past Vancouver Independent Archives Week Programs:

2017

2015

We acknowledge that this program took place on the ancestral, traditional, unceded, and occupied Indigenous territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, and in particular, the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. This land was never surrendered, relinquished, or handed over by these Nations to Canada or to British Columbia through a treaty or other means; it is sovereign and unsurrendered.

Presenting Partners

Recollective was a joint initiative of 221A, Artspeak, grunt gallery, Rungh Magazine, The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, VIVO Media Arts Centre, Western Front, and Allison Collins, Curator.

Contact

Emma Metcalfe Hurst
Recollective Project Coordinator
emma (at) grunt (dot) ca, (604) 875-9516

Site by The Future.