The film program Archival Sites of Speculation brings together artists, who draw on the archive as an object of artistic inquiry rather than merely a site of research and negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive. They developed methodologies of proximity and engagement with archives in order to reflect on colonial continuities. The films make visible what is absent from documentation and refer to the gaps in the transmission of memory, testimony or kept historical material. The artists apply a specific embodied practice as a way of closing the distance between one’s own body to the body of the archive through dance, touch, text, juxtaposition, cuts, collage or reading. With these methods, historical and archival research is combined with a “critical fabulation” to make productive sense of gaps and silences within an archive.

The project Anonymity and Absence: Archival Sites of Speculation is an experimental space within which methodologies of proximity and engagement with archives can be tested and divulged. The test sites are the Archives of the Austrian Association of Women Artists (VBKÖ) and the Archive of the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Angewandte Archive). This project seeks to contribute to critical discussions on the archive as a space of artistic research and the experimental methods deployed in examining the convergent and divergent histories of the Angewandte Archive and the VBKÖ Archive.