The Vulnerable Body in the Archive: Matriculating Oral Herstories of Art with (Self-)care

Abstract

Drawing from a research project focusing on women artists active in Wrocław in the 1970s, I propose an interdisciplinary approach for current and future art histories that is based on a combination of methods from various fields (cultural anthropology, social history, archival studies) and driven by feminist theory, activism for social and historical justice, and the politics of care.
Considering Wrocław’s historical and cultural context in the second half of the 20th century – being the main but extensively destroyed city of the so-called regained territories, populated almost entirely by people resettling from the Eastern Borderlands and Central Poland – and shifting the disciplinary focus from the objective (artefact) to the subjective (personal narrative), I would like to bring more attention to the multitude of diverse women’s stories that have not been incorporated into what we know as conventional art history. This approach, based on inclusion and collaboration, involves mutual discovering, creating, archiving, and disseminating of what I eventually name ‘oral art herstories’, combining ‘oral history’ as the main research method with ‘art herstories’ as the project’s more activist output and goal.
The research evolved slowly from 2014 and had a chance to bloom with substantial funding obtained in 2018 from the National Science Centre (NCN). Unfortunately, it was violently interrupted by the COVID-19 crisis. The risk of endangering the elderly artists willing to share their stories caused critical revision of the project and resulted in a withdrawal from outcome-oriented pursuits. This became the clarifying turning point where the project’s underlying values suddenly emerged: personal connection, mutual trust and care, establishing collective knowledge and shared agency. This could become an ethical agenda for an engaged art history, willing not only to rescue and reclaim the value of the overlooked or forgotten (initially after Ewa Domańska), but also to become mindfully inclusive and empowering for the living, resisting the neoliberal urge of academic production and perhaps becoming ‘relational art history’.