Join Sixty Inches From Center for the 2024 Chicago Archives + Artists Festival! This year’s festival embraces the theme of embodiment. Throughout this 3-day gathering, we’ll explore the ways archivists and artists preserve the legacies of our communities via talks, performances, music, and workshops.

We will have our usual festival offerings, including our Archive Roll Call, an artist-designed Photo Booth (hosted by artist and Sixty Visuals Editor Ireashia M. Bennett), and a series of archive digs and unfurlings—a term and format we’re borrowing from Never The Same’s 2013 project Unfurling: Five Explorations in Art, Activism, and Archiving. This will also be a continued celebration of our recently-released book Case Studies in Collaboration, published by For the Birds Trapped in Airports.

The space will be adorned with a site-specific installation by artist and Sixty contributor Natalia Villanueva Linares, and with a new mural by artist and Sixty Collective Co-Lead Katia Perez Fuentes. We will close out the night with our usual Festival Wind Down featuring BAILAR Y LLORAR 🎭 (a.k.a. DJ Jungyal & Light of Your Vida).

This year’s festival is co-curated by Kate Hadley Toftness, Tempestt Hazel, and Christina Nafziger.

The Chicago Archives + Artists Festival is generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art and Teiger Foundation. This festival is also part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.
ACCESSIBILITY NOTES

**Masks are required for those who attend and we will have HEPA air purifiers throughout the building and in the primary event space. Live CART (Communication Access Real-time Translation) will be provided during every panel of the event. Read more about accessibility for this venue and event in our Accessibility Guide.

___
FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

For this festival, we are calling our friends, communities, collaborators, and co-conspirators to bring their own knowledge, curiosities, and experiences to the following conversations, workshops, and offerings. Below is the full schedule. More speakers will be announced in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

DAY THREE // Sunday, August 4th

Extending Life: On Writing for the Archive and the Value of Somatic Preservation (Panel)
10am – 11am CST

Speakers: Britt Julious (Chicago Tribune), Aaliyah Christina (Performance Response Journal), & Nicky Ni (Sixty Inches From Center), Moderator: Tara Aisha Willis (Dancer, Writer, Curator)

The cycle of presenting art can be fleeting, especially for time-based media. A performance opens and closes, leaving those who witnessed the work the keepers of this experience. But what if we could extend the life of a piece? Can arts writing capture and prolong this moment? In this conversation, we’ll explore how arts writing can act as both critique and archive of this somatic experience–the act of witnessing art Join us in this discussion as we ask: What does it mean to write for the archive? How is writing for the archive different from other kinds of arts writing? What is the value of preserving the emotion an artwork elicited? For practices that don’t have archives that exist in conventional forms, what is the role of writing in its preservation? Live CART (Communication Access Real-time Translation) will be provided.

Unfurlings: Digging into the Personal Collections of Drag, Burlesque, and Sound Artists
11:30am – 2pm CST

Featured Artists: Ále Campos (a.k.a. Celeste), Jenn Freeman | Po’chop, and Trqpiteca (a.k.a. Natalie Murillo & Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero)

Take a look behind the stage through the personal materials of Chicago nightlife royalty! In this unfurling session we move our lens from day to night through the materials of local DJs and drag performers. Join us for a chance to dive into the archives, ephemera, and materials that surround the practices of artist and performance maker Ále Campos whose studio practice is anchored in the history and current vernacular of drag and their persona, ‘Celeste,’ movement-based performer Jenn Freeman | Po’Chop whose work pulls from drag and burlesque, modern and praise dance, spoken word and hip hop, and artist duo and production company Trqpiteca who together create incomparable cultural and sonic experiences through art and dance music.

An Oral History + Storytelling Workshop
12:30pm – 1:30pm CST

Facilitators: To be announced soon!

Understood to be one of the oldest forms of historical preservation, oral histories are a powerful way to gather and preserve the memories and stories of our communities. While we all have a relationship to this spoken form of storytelling and historical documentation, it is also an entire field of study that has its own legacy, methodologies, and process. During this workshop we will explore the difference between storytelling and oral histories, best practices, guidelines for using oral histories to preserve justice work, personal and trauma-informed approaches, and more. Live CART (Communication Access Real-time Translation) will be provided.

Ask An Archivist Group Advisory Sessions
2:30pm – 3:30pm CST

Our Ask An Archivist Advisory Sessions are an invitation for artists, archivists, curators, memory workers, and community preservationists of all experience levels to sit down with a small group of professionals and peers to get your archiving questions answered. During this hour you will have a chance to hop from table to table to ask your burning questions and listen in on questions from other attendees that you may not have thought to ask.

We’ve hand-selected a few of Sixty’s favorite archivists and memory workers who will bring to each table a wide breadth of knowledge in community archives, artist archiving, preserving time-based practices, audio/visual preservation, digitization planning, reparative efforts in the archives sector, and more. Space at each table is on a first-come basis.

Featured Archivists: Jehoiada Zechariah Calvin (Johnson Publishing Company Archive, Sixty Writer), Sara Chapman (Media Burn Archive), Leslie Guy (CONDUIT Project), Angelica Hernandez (Digitizing the Barrio, Puerto Rican Cultural Center), Haruhi Kobayashi (Experimental Sound Studio), Nicholas Lowe (Goat Island Archive, SAIC), James Wetzel (Experimental Sound Studio)

Archive Roll Call: A Community Resource Session
3:30pm – 4:30pm CST

A refreshed take on Sixty’s Archive Roll Call. The first part will include a rapid-fire session that goes down the list of local and regional repositories that specifically highlight and are welcoming to the histories and cultures of Sixty’s communities (Indigenous, trans, queer, diasporic, and disability). The second part will dive into useful tools and resources for connection, organizing, digital security, and safety within Sixty’s communities. Archivists and caretakers from select repositories will join us to share more about how to access their collections. Live CART (Communication Access Real-time Translation) will be provided.

The Atypical Archive: On Experimental, Anti-Material, and Environmentally-Minded Practices of Preservation (An Open Dialogue)
5pm – 6:30pm CST

Co-Moderators: Skyla Hearn (The Blackivists, Johnson Publishing Company Archive), Tempestt Hazel (Sixty Inches From Center), Speakers: Jordan Campbell (Alt Space Chicago + Redemptive Plastics), Dr. Courtney Pierre Joseph (Haitian Oral History Project), Tanuja Devi Jagernauth (Writer, Abolitionist; Little Village Environmental Justice Organization / LVEJO), Isis Ferguson (Feminist, Arts Administrator)

Who decides what is remembered and how? In what ways are Sixty’s communities practicing and being called to practice non-institutional ways of preserving our histories? What are the environmental, safety, and privacy costs of archives, preservation, and preservation-centered creative practices? Can we choose to be forgotten and for our legacy to exist in a non-material way? How must our understanding of archival practice and preservation change in the face of climate urgency? How does our understanding of archives change when viewed through a lens of non-attachment and ephemerality? What can we glean from Indigenous ways of knowing? Join us and add your thoughts as we get a little existential in this open conversation alongside artists, culture keepers, and archivists whose work inspire us to expand and complicate our understandings of cultural preservation and artistic practice. Live CART (Communication Access Real-time Translation) will be provided.
Festival Wind Down: A Reflection Session + Listening Party

7pm – 9pm

Help us celebrate the close of the festival! Join us for a final reflection on the festival themes paired with a set by BAILAR Y LLORAR 🎭, a queer latine vinyl DJ duo between DJ Jungyal & Light of Your Vida, a.k.a. Luz Magdaleno Flores, Sixty’s beloved editor for Sesenta en Español! BAILAR Y LLORAR’s sounds evoke both sonic energies composed of salsa, dance hall, and house music from Jungyal’s Puerto Rican identity and lowrider oldies, soul, and romanticas from Luz’s upbringing in California.

As a duo they bring expansive knowledge in music from the Caribbean and diaspora from Fania Records, Boleros, 80’s Merengue, cumbia, hip hop, mariachi, and good ole Dance Hall beats. They evoke nostalgic memories of family parties and backyard carne asada mixed with bajo mundo and sad girl music.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: 2024 Chicago Archives + Artists Festival: Embodying the Archive: Day Three, Aaliyah Christina, Ále Campos, Angelica Hernandez, Ankit Khadgi, Britt Julious, Chicago, Chicago Archives + Artists Festival, Christina Nafziger, Courtney Pierre Joseph, DJ Jungyal, Emily Hooper Lansana, Erin Glasco, Experimental Station, Fawn Pochel, Gerber Hart Library and Archives, Haruhi Kobayashi, Hyde Park, Isis Ferguson, Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero, James Wetzel, Jehoiada Zechariah Calvin, Jenn Freeman, Jordan Campbell, Jose Luis Benavides, Kate Hadley Toftness, Katia Perez Fuentes, Luz Magdaleno Flores, Maira Khwaja, Natalia Villanueva Linares, Natalie Murillo, Nicholas Lowe, Nicky Ni, Patric McCoy, Po'Chop, Sara Chapman, Sixty Inches From Center, Skyla Hearn, Tanuja Devi Jagernauth, Tara Aisha Willis, Tempestt Hazel.