In partnership with Wellcome Collection, Bloomsbury Festival, Live Art Development Agency London
Daylighting was a public exhibition of collective social sculpture in which we bought a printing press and collective archiving processes into conversation with materials from the Wellcome Collection Archives. Daylighting was a collaborative platform that asked how we might breach and intervene on existing archives and systems of knowledge.
As we collective made new entries into the archives at Wellcome Collection in response to history’s ongoing omissions, exploring cracks in the narratives and daylighting new ones. Letterpress as a medium for printed artwork takes time and care, assembling letters, physically handling, moving, setting type to create deep impressions on the page and in the archive.
At its core is the production of Daylight, a collaborative newspaper and collective artwork that explored the presence of womxn through art, autotheory and critical thinking. With original contributions by Jade Montserrat, Ivor Mackaskill, Meenakshi Thirukode, Feminist Duration Reading Group and Diana Damian Martin and reprinted images and texts from Audrey, Joy Gregory, Cath Hoffmann, Jenny Moore, GraceGraceGrace, Claire Macdonald, Claire Collison and Heiba Lamara, Sofia Niazi and Rose Nordin (OOMK)
This project explored the interconnections of art, activism, performance, politics, health and print, in a live printing workshop supported with events, talks, reading groups and collective writing.
This was held alongside a four-day programme of events through which we explored the interconnections of art, activism, performance, politics, health and print, with singing and sound interventions throughout the building, public discussions on sexual health, collective readings about the exclusions of the archive and collective writing events about the politics of bodies. With artists OOMK, Women of Colour Index Reading Group, F*Choir, Joy Gregory, award winning public historian Kelly Foster, archivist and historian Lesley Hall and the Wellcome Zine Club.
Through the paper we explored the way in which bodies are represented in public archives, the way an archive structures and shapes the knowledge. Through the public program we asked how we might challenge the inheritances of the systems of classification that are used to arrange and order the knowledge that represents our bodies. How might we collectively resist the inheritances of western imperialism inherent in the ways our bodies are present in archives ?
DAYLIGHT is a publication that emerges out of
a Wellcome Trust Commission called DAYLIGHTING for the Bloomsbury Festival, October 2018. With thanks to Emily Wiles and Malavika Anderson at Wellcome Collection and to all the incredible archivists, librarians and thinkers we met there and to Kate Anderson and the Bloomsbury Festival.
Thank you to all the amazing artists who form the paper and the programme of DAYLIGHTING; including Nicola Cook, Kelly Foster,Lesley Hall, F*Choir, Arike Oke, Fabrizio Terranova & Donna Haraway, Loesja Vigour, Alice White and Women of Colour Index Reading Group
Beyond the Wellcome we are grateful to the thinkers whose ideas have shaped the paper, Denise Ferriera
Da Silva, JJ Halberstam Donna Haraway, Luce Irigaray, Ursula LeGuin, Audre Lorde, Fred Moten, Maggie Nelson, Elizabeth Povinelli, Helena Reckitt, Irit Rogoff, Isabelle Stengers, Christina Sharpe and Virginia Woolf
Additional thanks to The Cass at London Metropolitan University for the loan of the letterpress equipment.
Live printing in the print room
Roman votive breast offering. Wellcome Collection
We want our bodies back with *fChoir
Audrey diary excerpt
Joy Gregory Artist Talk
Joy Gregory Beauty comb. Photo courtesy of the artist
Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi visiting the reading room
Audience reading together as part of the Women of Colour Index Reading Group