This collaborative artistic-research project, dedicated to working in/with archives, recognizes imperial and colonial violence underlying conventional archival practices and reflects on the possibility of transforming this violence into something generative. It extends critical attention towards the relationship between conducting artistic research dedicated to archives and performing the work of archiving in artistic ways, both of which derive from queer studies, decolonial studies, applied human rights, and critical archival studies. It proposes a process-oriented approach that involves collaboratively practicing and theorizing on artistic-research methods with the aim of building a sustainable Vienna-based network of artists and institutions working with archives. A key element for the above is technology, employed as a tool that enhances the project’s accessibility, as a format of artistic research, and as an alternative modality of collaboration.

The project’s core operational strategy converges two motivations: to conceptualize archives as relational entities and to recognize the epistemological shift towards practicing research as art. Methodologically, this strategy is defined by two intersecting agendas, described by Eve Tuck and C. Ree in their “A Glossary of Haunting”: of “righting the wrongs,” which expresses a call for ethics and justice in archive-based research, and of “writing the wrongs,” which investigates possible modes of representation and narration for archival research. Along this proposal, the project practices and negotiates artistic-research methods of archival research by continuously updating its methodology on the basis of the knowledge generated through its methods, outcomes, and collaborations, and by fostering a network of artists and institutions that research, theorize on, and perform arts-based archival research.

For this purpose, the project employs a few methods, concentrated within its “Cartography,” the knowledge repository and web-based platform, which, together with its design, coding, launch, and updates, functions as a research journal and a space where the artistic-research production is performed, documented, and discussed. This includes Co_Labs, a three-part “laboratory” that hosts collaborative artistic-research practices by inviting researching artists and institutions to do critical work towards the project’s projected outcomes (exhibition, book publication, workshop), as well as Net_Works, a web-based residency program that invites specific positions in sound art, writing, and community-building work to critically engage with and contaminate the intended course of action.

Learn more about the project’s disciplinary setting

Dr. Rafał Morusiewicz, PhD (they/them, no pronoun), is a Vienna-based researching visual artist, curator, and writer. Morusiewicz is the author of two doctoral theses: a “PhD-in-Practice” project at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, dedicated to the “queer remixing” of Polish “communist” film, and a doctoral dissertation at the University of Warsaw’s Institute of Applied Social Sciences, which proposes and performs queering strategies on several early-21st century Polish cinema films. Their artistic-research practice has led to several experimental films, screened at film festivals, presented as installations at exhibition venues, and programmed at online platforms in and outside Vienna. For over two decades, Morusiewicz has taught courses in artistic research, film studies, academic writing, and ESL at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (the “Vienna Master of Arts in Applied Human Rights” program), Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Webster Vienna Private University, and Warsaw’s SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Since 2020, Morusiewicz has collaborated with Guilherme Maggessi as Maggessi/Morusiewicz. By employing tools and strategies stemming from their diverse backgrounds (design, found-footage film, performance, sampling, stitching, silkscreening), the artistic duo explores modes of creating archives and fabulating futures in expanded and intimate ways. The duo has presented artworks, curated exhibitions and screenings, performed, and showed their films in several institutions and independent spaces, such as Belvedere 21 (Vienna, AT), Exhibit Eschenbachgasse (Vienna, AT), Kunstraum Lakeside (Klagenfurt, AT), VBKÖ (Vienna, AT), wuk performingarts (Vienna, AT), SPEDITION (Bremen, DE), queerANarchive (Split, HR), and film place collective (London, UK).

Guilherme Maggessi (he/him) is an art director and graphic designer, whose practice extends and expands into the fields of academic research, fine arts, and performance. For the past 10 years, he has worked in multiple contexts: advertisement and consultancy agencies, from big brands and companies to a self-owned graphic design studio developing works for small-to-medium businesses and NGOs.

After moving to Vienna in 2019, Maggessi has reoriented his practice around academic research, fine arts, and performance. Currently finishing his M.A. in Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Maggessi further develops his interest in the construction of othering and orientalizing images. Parallel to his studies, he has curated exhibitions (The Poiesis of Composting, 10.2021-02.2022; No Final Version, 09.2022-10.2022; QM&A Artist Collective 2022, 10.2022), has done teaching (Curatorial Studies, SS 2021, IKW, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), and has worked with arts-education institutions on projects within artistic research (Confronting Realities, PEEK | FWF, Filmakademie Wien, 2022-2024) and critical diversity (Tricky Moments, mdw, 2021-2023).

queerANarchive is a grassroots artivist initiative from Split, Croatia, led by Tonči Kranjčević Batalić, an art historian, curator, cultural worker, and video artist. Their agenda includes contributing to the development of the local queer art scene by doing artistic research with queer archives, which consists in tracing and reimagining, through artistic practices, the past and present cruising practices in Split. Rafał Morusiewicz, one of the project’s core researchers, was invited in 2019 to conduct a film-based workshop and curate an exhibition in the context of queerANarchive’s ongoing cultural program. We bring them into our project for the purpose of bringing an outer perspective to our Vienna-oriented project, and, at the same time, of engaging with an artivist initiative that performs research as art.

You can read more about the origins of queerANarchive here

QWIEN is a Vienna-based grassroots institution that collects, preserves, and researches the queer history of Austria, with the focus on the city of Vienna. A part of their activity consists in designing and conducting mediation projects, such as city walks, that serve the purpose of popularizing the Viennese little-known queer past. While QWIEN’s main research focus falls on the persecution of “homosexuals” and “transsexuals” during WW2, they conduct other research projects. One of them is “Von Homoerotik zu Homophobie,” which investigates the development of the concept of manhood in relation to the idea of the Orient in cultural production from 1850 to 2016. Guilherme Maggessi, one of the project’s core researchers, is part of the latter. We invite QWIEN into our project because they are a grassroots archiving institution with a specifically situated archival practice, which pertains to researching queer history as inherently related to the history of Viennese museums and therefore doing research and mediation projects with state-funded institutions, such as Belvedere and Wien Museum. While collaborating with other archiving institutions, they also house a variety of archives, pertaining to, for instance, AIDS Hilfe and Liga der Menschenrechte.

Volkskundemuseum is an ethnographic museum located in Vienna, Austria. In 2018, the museum acquired “The Shores of Austria,” a curatorial project that investigates the generative possibilities of working with the epistemological “ruins” of ethnographic museums. For us, this project, as well as a few others preceding it (“Museum on the Run” and “Heimat Machen,” both in 2017), exemplifies how a partly state-funded institution can conceptually and materially contest not only its own history, but also the ways in which it makes history. We bring them into our project as an institution with a long experience of working with external partners and the intersectional interest in not only doing ethnography but also critically interrogating ethnography as a discipline.