2024 Chicago Archives + Artists Festival: Embodying the Archive

Join Sixty Inches From Center for our latest Chicago Archives + Artists Festival! The theme of embodiment will guide this 3-day gathering, and we will use the weekend to explore memory keeping, storytelling, and the ways archivists + artists work their magic to preserve the legacies of our communities.

We will have our usual festival offerings, including our Archives Roll Call, an artist-designed Photo Booth (hosted by artist and Sixty Visuals Editor ), and a series of archive digs and unfurlings–a term and format we're borrowing from Never The Same's 2013 project . This will also be a continued celebration of our recently-release book , published by .
The space will be adorned with a site-specific installation by artist and Sixty contributor with a new mural by artist and Sixty Collective Co-Lead . We will close out the night with our usual Festival Wind Down featuring BAILAR Y LLORAR ? (a.k.a. DJ Jungyal & ).

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The Chicago Archives + Artists Festival is generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the 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.

**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.

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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!

Kinship within the Archive: On the Emotions, Vulnerabilities, and Personal Connection of Archives (Panel)

6pm - 7:30pm CST (Doors Open At 5:30pm)

Speakers: To be announced soon!

How does the concept of “kinship” inform collecting, archiving, and research practices? What are the parameters that should be in place around family collections? What concerns and vulnerabilities come with placing your family’s archive into a public archive? What are the alternative options for your personal collections? Join us in an exploration of these questions and more. Live CART (Communication Access Real-time Translation) will be provided.

If you love the thought of getting up close and personal with the rarely seen materials from incomparable Chicago collections, this is your chance. We have invited some of our favorite archivists, collectors, and artists to choose a selection of materials from their archives that compliment the festival's themes and topics of conversations. For this night of the festival, we've invited photographer and art collector , writer a curator , and the caretakers of the –one of the largest repositories of LGBTQ+ content in the world–to choose materials from their archives and ephemera collections that speak to the rich history of queer life and culture in Chicago across time and generations. Join us prior to the roundtable to explore these materials and hear stories from the archives.

Speakers: Maira Khwaja (Invisible Institute, Chicago Police Torture Archive), Jose Luis Benavides (Artist), Fawn Pochel (First Nations Garden), Anita Sharma (Visual Arts Archivist, Curator of What Is Seen & Unseen: Mapping South Asian American Art in Chicago); Co-Moderators: Erin Glasco (The Blackivists, Interrupting Criminalization, Shift Collective), Tempestt Hazel (Sixty Inches From Center)
How has embodiment been used as a strategy when a people's history, community, and culture is being displaced, erased, or suppressed? What embodiment and preservation strategies have been used to preserve the histories of communities that have experienced high levels of cultural erasure or censorship? What does preservation look like in the face of genocide, political aggression, and global devastation? What methods and strategies have communities used to ensure the safety of their material records, histories, and culture? What are the repositories for preservation that intentionally do not center institutions or their conventional material forms? We invite you to join us in a roundtable conversation with artists, archivists, writers, and community organizers to discuss these topics and more. Live CART (Communication Access Real-time Translation) will be provided.

Speakers: Britt Julious (Chicago Tribune), Aaliyah Christina (Performance Response Journal), & Nicky Ni (Sixty Inches From Center)
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.

Featured Artists: Po'chop and more–to be announced soon!

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 artists like the movement-based performer Po’Chop, whose work pulls from drag and burlesque, modern and praise dance, and spoken word and hip hop.

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.

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 (, ), Sara Chapman (), Leslie Guy (), Haruhi Kobayashi (), Nicholas Lowe (, ), James Wetzel ()

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.

Co-Moderators: Skyla Hearn (The Blackivists, Johnson Publishing Company Archive), Tempestt Hazel (Sixty Inches From Center), Speakers: To be announced soon!

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.

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.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Experimental Station, 6100 South Blackstone Avenue, Chicago, United States