CENTRE FOR CURATING THE ARCHIVE

The Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative partners with the Centre for Curating the Archive at the Michaelis School of Art, under the direction of Professor Pippa Skotnes. The partnership involves structured joint supervisions and collaborations in terms of the UCT Strategic Initiative in the area 'Archive and Curation'.

The Centre for Curating the Archive was established as a vehicle for the conservation and creative use of both object, image and paper collections. It builds on UCT's dual institutional strength in its numerous and valuable research collections on which much critical research is based, and in its established, and in many areas, cutting-edge, expertise in the area of presenting those collections.

The linked research, often revealed in the public domain, uses these collections to facilitate and enrich public engagement around key questions of our times. It also aims to open up novel combinations of the historically separated domains of the creative arts, and the truth-claiming discourses of history and the social and natural sciences. In coupling the avowedly creative activity of curation with the seemingly objective site of archive the CCA signals our intention to draw attention to past and present processes of the making of archives of all kinds and the creation of meanings that flowed and flow from this practice. http://cca.uct.ac.za/