The Accidental Archive: A Community Workshop 

The Accidental Archive: A Community Workshop
Thursday, October 22, 6–8 pm
303 Bond Street, Brooklyn

Presented alongside our fall exhibition Open Access: Exploring 130 Years of American Design, join this interactive workshop led by writer and artist Divya Mehra. We’ll glean through our own personal archives and ask questions about value, the mundane, and what it means to choose to embrace our own archival practice.

Participants will bring an accumulation of their own — digital or physical — and translate it into a personal archive. Using a series of constraints inspired by Oulipo and other rule-based approaches (sorting, removing, repeating, obscuring, connecting, rearranging) we’ll treat these fragments as material. Through language, drawing, collage, and classification, individual records will gradually become a physical archive assembled from the things we happened to keep. What patterns emerge when we reorganize the everyday? What do the things we carry tell us about ourselves?