Archiving Encounters is a series dedicated to the exploration of archives in contemporary art practices. This series takes conversations with artists, and their practices, as starting points to encounter the different kinds of archives they choose to work with. Often artists use ‘the archive’ as a theme itself, produce new taxonomies, respond to real archival materials to critically challenge modes of knowledge production, or use it as a framing device to invent characters or events from the past that are put in dialogue with the present to shed new light on contemporaneity. In this sense, archives become building sites. In the last article, we explored how James Thompson’s practice of casting expands beyond the material process itself to become a method to document spaces and create new archival materials while it is also used as a methodology to rearrange the existing archive and explore the unrealised possibilities of places and spaces to construct new multidimensional experiences of reality. In this issue, I am interviewing Karen Watson and Jonathan Orlek, co-curators of “No Going Back” an archival exhibition presented at East Street Arts, Leeds, in April 2024. In conversation with them, we explored the curatorial strategies to exhibit the archive through the documentation of key projects and their echoes from the future. Jonathan was invited to work with the archive to curate the exhibition but he could only do so meaningfully through the collaboration with Karen. This was possible only by practising the archive: taking a slow curatorial approach, alongside lived experience, and mixing it with embedded researchand dialogical processes. Practising the archive meant building and sharing knowledge and to create new meanings by juxtaposing objects, relationships and time.
Jonathan Orlek is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Liverpool John Moores University. His edited book, Artist-Led Housing: Histories, Residencies, Spaces (2024) explores the role of artist-led organisations within the provision of housing. With a wide range of contributions—and expanding out of his embedded research and practice with East Street Arts—the book suggests future trajectories for living together creatively. Jonathan is also a director of Studio Polpo, a Sheffield-based social enterprise architecture practice. With Studio Polpo he has undertaken several collaborative projects on the design of high streets, shared housing, and play spaces, including The High Street of Exchanges, an immersive installation for the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021.
Karen Watson is an artist and organiser, she founded and co-directed East Street Arts, an arts organisation in Leeds. Her name was recently included “Ribbons” as one of nearly 400 inspirational Leeds women, voted for by members of the public, being celebrated with a new sculpture in the heart of the city’s cultural quarter.
Benedetta D’Ettorre: You just co-curated an archival exhibition “No Going Back”, which coincided with the launch of the book “Artist-led Housing: Histories, Residencies, Spaces” edited by Jonathan and a public programme curated by Kate West. How did this project come about?
Jonathan: I was working on the book as a continuation of my collaborative PhD with East Street Arts. The book includes material from East Street Arts’ archive, and a chapter written by Karen reflecting on East Street Arts and the Leeds art scene in 1998. Discussing the book with staff at East Street Arts, it was clear that they were really engaged in the archive and were keen to use it to understand the organisation within which they were working. I started having conversations with Kate West, Head of Artist Support and Development, who was invested in the organisation and wanted to learn more from its past. I was also speaking with James Connolly, a copywriter within the organisation, who contributed a chapter to the book. He was very excited by the archive and infected everybody with a real interest and energy in learning from it. They both realised that their role could be informed by the archive. People working in the organisation wanted to learn about its history to influence future projects and decision-making. This dynamic led me to develop an interest in the practice of ‘living archives’ in relation to artist-led organisations and projects.
One of the first things I did was create a large map of projects, covering East Street Arts’ 30-year history. Over several iterations, this map identified key thematic strands of activity within the archive (such as supporting art-student collectives, the provision of urban infrastructure, artist support, and the development of social art practices). I included projects by East Street Arts alongside other artist-led activities and related national/citywide initiatives – so you could see projects and themes shooting off in different directions, in long trajectories. Karen and I discussed and made notes on this map quite intensely – while we were discussing the early projects, the projects undertaken before activities were consolidated under the umbrella of East Street Arts, Karen marked a line on the map and said something to the effect of: we could have stopped or returned to something very different up until here, but after this moment there was ‘no going back’. This gave us the title of the exhibition.
Karen: I think for me what triggered it was that I was leaving the organisation after 30 years. If there was going to be a moment, that was the moment to ask, what is East Street? What have we done? What can we learn from it? What’s going forward? We have never done anything formally with the archive, but something that we regularly do is try to see the connections between the things that we are doing now and things we did in the past. I always say that we never really ‘leave’ projects, a project might finish but we don’t. There are threads that go through the whole of East Street’s history, looking at similar things in different ways with different artists as the world changes around us. We used to make links in our contextual information and marketing materials but, as we got busy and people came and went, we have been doing it a lot less. We’ve always regretted that because I think there’s always a lot of learning in looking back as well as looking forward. Jonathan Orlek asked me to write a contribution to his book about a specific project In-House and I just could not write about it without saying something about everything else at that time. There were certain years that were so pivotal in terms of our developments, our understanding of what we were doing and our growth.
B.D.: How did the archive form? What is in the archive?
K: It began by just not wanting to throw anything away because it’s the result of the work that you’ve been doing. It used to be a lot bigger than it is now because when we moved, I threw a lot away. I tried to keep the things that just gave a flavour of the projects. It was really hard to swear things away, but it took up a whole room and we couldn’t afford the space. In the files were endless funding applications, long discussions over e-mail on projects, funding, minutes of meeting and eventually before e-mails, letters! If you set out to keep an archive of your work I think it needs some kind of understanding of what you’re doing and we never had that discussion formally, so what happened was in some boxes you’ll find things like photographs, artefacts, marketing material, anything produced as part of a project. There’s no knowing what I’m going to find when I open a box on a project. It’s a whole variety. Sometimes a box could have several projects if they were small and there wasn’t much to collect, sometimes you’d get a whole year’s worth of projects and then sometimes a project has three boxes because it was such a big project. They are fascinating for some people to look at. I tried to put something in a box at the end of every project until it got to a point where things have been happening so much online it’s been harder to keep a hold of and the boxes have got a little bit fragmented. There are still actual things to keep, but I have no idea what we keep online or digitally.
B.D.:Is it primarily you who decides what goes into a box?
K: It was for a very long time. I stopped keeping track and what happened was other staff members would think ‘this needs to be in the archive’ then pop it in the archive area. When other people brought things to the archive, there were bigger packet boxes and people just put everything into them or they were left on the floor so we had piles of things to sift through, I spent a lot of time looking through that. I went through the boxes, and then I understood why it’s hard to know what things mean in there because when I’m sorting through what others had left I didn’t know where they belonged because I hadn’t been directly involved. I had to do some extra searching, so I understand how difficult it is when you’re not involved.
B.D.: Was there a difference as things moved more online?
K: I think the real difference now is there isn’t one person that’s got their head on the archive like I had. Nobody’s reminding everybody to archive things. What happens is if you go into the server and the filing system that they have, there will always be a folder that says ‘archive’. When a project’s finished whatever’s in those folders goes into that folder that says ‘archive’. It is literally like going into the room and being faced with hundreds of boxes that need sorting. People don’t know what to keep, so they tend to keep everything. There’s no guidance for people and so you just keep everything. When things were more physical it was easier to understand what were the key elements to be kept that would still make projects accessible.
B.D.: What were the challenges of working with the archive?
J: Working with a more informal archive, which has very little categorisation (just handwritten notes on the side of each archive box), throws up challenges. It requires a slow process of dialogue with the people who have lived, created, and maintained the archive. Working from East Street Arts one day a week, over several months, to spend time with Karen and the staff was a really lovely thing, but this embedded process also responded to the limitations of working with an archive which was not only about an artist-led organisation, but lived with and within it.
The projects that we focused on in the exhibition were happening at a time when the work of East Street Arts’ co-founders (Karen Watson and Jon Wakeman) was quite nebulous. Karen and Jon were doing things as individual artists, as an artist duo, as East Street Arts, as part of several other organisations with different names, as well as in collaboration with other collectives and networks. So another challenge became, how do you present the East Street Arts Archive in a way that doesn’t just scoop up lots of collaborative projects into one thing and say, ‘Ta-da! This is East Street Arts.’ Material is in the archive because it relates to something that Karen and Jon were involved in, but in the earlier projects the connections to East Street Arts are not always obvious or tidy. Karen and I would open boxes together and I would ask lots of questions: How does that object relate to you? What’s your role in creating that? Why is that material in the archive? Who has edited that piece? Who did you work with on that? … In the exhibition, the map of projects and interpretation text for each room tried to address some of these questions.
K: I think I struggled with the exhibition without Jon Wakeman being part of it because his voice wasn’t there. In the middle of it all, for all the pros and cons, there’s the continuity of me and Jon. I had my own set things that I delivered. He had his own. But there was something in the middle where we both came together that made a difference. We dedicated our lives to East Street, our holidays were about it, we talked about East Street Arts when we had tea. It was a way of living and it was a way of running something that made what we did, that made East Street. I felt like we had to be careful not to be indulgent. It’s our past. We cared about it. But how do we make that past relevant to other people? Once you move from talking about it to action and a public viewing, you are responsible for making it interesting and accessible. Why would people want to come and see this? What is there in this? These conversations are important to me and Jon but how do we extract what’s important to others?
B.D.: How did you collaborate?
J: The exhibition was a start in telling some of the stories that are in the archive, but which can only be made sense of by chatting with Karen and Jon. A lot of knowledge surrounding the archival material is in their heads, so the exhibition was also a way to make the archive a bit more accessible to people that didn’t have direct engagement with them on the projects. It came about through regular time spent together and with the material in the archive. I was doing embedded research with East Street Arts during my PhD and I saw the returning one day a week as an extension of that embedded research practice. However, I come to the archive as an outsider to the specific projects explored. I felt I could push against certain narratives, or have my own focus, contribute my own reading of the archive to inform the exhibition, and that was pretty important. I wasn’t just telling a pre-established story. There was a collaboration there, and I think the exhibition needed a more removed perspective in addition to the lived one Karen has described, to hold lots of strands together and decide which of the many stories and narratives unfolding from the archive to foreground. This is maybe something that relates to practising the archive: living it, then looking at it from a point of removal, through a collaborative process.
K: If somebody was just looking through the boxes, they wouldn’t know how to connect some projects and that’s why it’s important that we have these discussions. There has to be trust or those conversations wouldn’t have worked, and I had complete trust in what you were doing and why you were doing it, so that enabled me to step in and just listen and hear from your point of view. We have a long relationship and we have worked together on your PhD. Because a lot of that knowledge was locked up in my head and Jon’s head, and you had to start somewhere around that and it comes with some assumptions and some viewpoints because of what you’ve got in front of you, but I never felt that they weren’t up for a discussion or further investigation or a different point of view being listened to so and that’s what I appreciate. There needs to be some trust there that you can have that conversation because if somebody’s coming and going they see something without understanding its complexity and you feel under attack because they’re not willing to listen to a counter point, then you can’t engage and you don’t get something out of it. In our collaboration it always felt to me, there’s a place to listen, to, talk, to understand different points of view. I learnt a lot from things you brought and why you brought them and certainly opening up the discussions to get to that point where we could recognise something we maybe hadn’t seen before that was happening at that time without you feeling confident to say I think we should look at this perspective, we couldn’t have achieved that. It never felt there was any point where I was going to walk away and go ‘why did he say that?’ This is for me the most fundamental thing.
B.D.: What did you select and how did you select the work?
J: The decision was made to focus on a relatively narrow period of time (1998-2003), around the ‘no going back’ moment. Karen and I identified five key projects within this period, which were significant in shaping the work of East Street Arts and which have clear thematic threads into subsequent activity. Each of the five projects were given a distinct room in the exhibition space. Room 1, ‘Cheeky Strategies and Artwork Pranks (1998)’, focused on a performance project and prank called Going Places by a group of Leeds University students called Leeds13 – which East Street Arts hosted in their project space at East Street Mills. The students pretended to go on holiday to Spain and crafted a sophisticated prank which made national headlines. TV reports, chat shows, and newspapers criticised them for using their funds to finance a trip to Spain and, in the process of unravelling what actually happened, questioned what art is and can be. Room 2, ‘Exhibiting in Non-Conventional Spaces (1998)’, drew attention to In-House a series of installations in a back-to-back terraced house in Leeds, initiated by Ballyhoo, one of the art collectives Karen and Jon were part of at the time. This is an early example of Jon and Karen working in a non-traditional gallery space and their interest in housing. Room 3, ‘Programming at the Scale of the City (1998)’, presented Leeds Fringe Photography Festival, which was curated by Karen and took over a wide range of spaces, including bus stops, public toilets, and shops. Including this project was important to exemplify how the co-founders of East Street shifted identities and roles in and around the organisation as it emerged. Room 4, ‘Processes of Participation and Conflict (1999)’ presented ‘A Christmas Pudding for Henry’, a multi-sited commission from the Henry Moore Institute. Led by Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, six artists and artist collectives from the Jan van Eyck Academy and six based locally in and around Leeds (including Karen and Jon) collectively undertook a project on cultural infrastructures. This is a key project for Karen and Jon and the development of East Street Arts as they learnt a lot from Jeanne’s approach and work. Room 5, ‘Developing Long-Term Support Structures’, filled a corridor space with notes and administrative documentation from ‘Demystifying Contemporary Art Practice (March 2002–May 2003)’, an artist support programme for six artists. This is another strand of activity that characterises East Street Arts’ work.
Although we only re-presented five projects in depth, we introduced ‘echoes from the future’ as a device for exploring thematic links and resonances across the whole of the archive – blowing open the otherwise tight chronology and focus. Throughout the exhibition, archival material which resonated with the content and theme of the different rooms was displayed, with a short annotation, in a blue folder. If, we hoped, visitors were immersed in the different rooms – imagining themselves in a different place and time – then the blue folders would be an archival echo from the future! The five key projects gave depth to the exhibition, while the echoes provided breadth.
K: It was a way to make the threads between each project explicit, where they had previously only really existed through that shared space between Jon and myself, all the conversations as we were defining parameters for the ongoing work of East Street Arts. Identifying themes through the projects and looking back at the archives with those themes in mind allowed us to make sense of this legacy in a way that it could be shared. To articulate what we felt about how each project feeds into the next, which is the history of East Street.
B.D.: What was your curatorial approach?
J: I wanted to prioritise projects that offered and demonstrated creative and critical engagements with the city. East Street Arts do experimental pilot projects alongside work which sits very neatly within dominant processes of urban change and development. When selecting the ‘echoes’, I prioritised the projects that offered something different to commercial development in the city.
K: I agree with that. I think we were very aware while we were talking that we could have included a whole number of different projects around the people involved and everybody that’s made a big difference to Leeds in different ways. Like our European partners, or projects with like-minded organisations. But we wouldn’t have got to the point of some of the key understandings where a decision was made and our history. And it changed over time. We looked at projects and put them back in again, then took them out When we hosted the chat with me and Jon, the co-founder and current co-director, there people in the room that came because their organisations are equally as old. They’ve got similar kinds of archives. They’re artist-led groups and they wanted to join that conversation. The appetite is out there for similar sized artists led organisations to engage in this process because it involved them. A sense of I need to understand what you’re doing because we’re trying to understand what we’re doing. What was really important for me was when Jonathan looked at what he ended up calling the “echoes and the future”. That was a really important part of deciding which projects to choose. We were asking how does this project position itself? What impact did it have? What are the themes that are coming through it? What would the story be if you elongated it? These questions teased out some things that I’d forgotten. They teased out why we chose the projects that we did.I am just thinking…How do we archive the archive exhibition?
J: For the exhibition there was already an archive box labelled ‘No Going Back’
K: Ah, ok, so now archiving the archive.
