Issue #1 - Clarke - Voices from the Archive

Voices from the Archive

Helen Clarke

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Voices from the Archive (2018) is a set of ten posters presented in the form of a broadsheet newspaper. The work published here shows the posters individually. Voices... re-composes archival material from the Reclaim the Night (RTN) movement, encountered during a residency at the Feminist Archive North (in the University of Leeds Special Collections) in 2018. Reclaim the Night is a movement that began in Leeds in 1977, partially as a response to the Yorkshire Ripper murders when women were advised by West Yorkshire Police to stay at home after dark, but also as a broader protest against violence directed at women and girls. Marches and direct action were undertaken in Leeds and London, protests that gradually became international, continuing into the present in response to ongoing acts of violence against women in public space.

The poems that are created through the posters are generated from type-written accounts of the RTN walks, and the court cases that followed. Extracts of text were selected because of their (sometimes controversial) subject matter, because they were poetically or otherwise evocative of the period through the language used, or for their visual appeal—handwritten interjections, personal reflections and mistakes by the writers, that added subjectivity in contrast to the objectivity of the language of the court and newspaper accounts.  The selections were based on themes reflecting my interest in the significance of the women’s clothing as provocation or political statement; the solidarity of the walks; and to reflect the labour involved in this form of personal and political document. These fragments were then combined in Photoshop with press images of the walks from Leeds and London. The collagic technique used in the artwork intentionally reflects the process of my research in the archive, where I had to piece together the available material in order to understand the sequence of the events the material depicted. This disorientation is replicated in the experience of the reader of the work through the fragmented presentation of historical events.

I propose the use of quotation in my practice as an allegorical method, taken from Sigrid Weigel’s Body-and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin.[1] The story that is told with my method reveals political narratives. I break the thought-images out of their continuum in order to speak the text. This cut-up method seeks to retain something of the original experience, reflecting the DIY aesthetic of the Women’s Liberation Movement produced in the 70’s and 80’s. Posters in the archive were often handmade, collaged, photocopied, hand typed or painted. This was often done at low cost, so as to inexpensively promote events such as RTN, as well as fundraisers, consciousness-raising work and other services relevant to women. I propose the allegorical method as confirmation of the value of the quotation/fragment in both academic/art writing and visual art practice.

The themes addressed in this work reflect those of my doctoral submission which examines the politics of women’s bodies in the public space of the street. I practice and interrogate both lone and collective walking by women (artists, geographers, activists) in urban space. Voices... combines photographic images with an iterative writing practice that appropriates found text, to celebrate the feminist histories of Leeds, and the ‘moments of collective joy’ that Lynne Segal identifies in women’s activism.[2] The themes have resonance with current concerns around women’s rights to walk safely in cities, and the attacks on the right to protest, such as those in the UK Policing Bill.

I position the work as a form of ‘Archive Fanfiction’, a concept proposed by poet Holly Pester, who notes that experimental archival methodologies are  ‘part of a critically transgressive epistemological stance that expands feminist critiques, universalising master narratives and archive orthodoxies’.[3] Voices from the Archive enables a form of storytelling where the archive itself is given space to speak. Through the new connections made by this allegorical method, and where subjectivity and anecdote are recognised as central to marginal histories, operating as a challenge to established academic frameworks for knowledge distribution.

Endnotes

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[1] Sigrid Weigel, Body-and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, trans. by Georgina Paul with Rachel McNicholl & Jeremy Gaines (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).

[2] Lynne Segal, Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy (London: Verso, 2017).

[3] Holly Pester, ‘Archive Fanfiction: experimental archive research methodologies and feminist epistemological tactics’, Feminist Review, 115, 2017, 114–129, p. 114.