A Fragile Archive

A Fragile Archive: The Activist Archive of Robin Metcalfe
.zip file, computer
Dimensions variable
2019

 A perpetually unfinished project, A Fragile Archive is one version of an installation   of archival material from Robin Metcalfe’s community-based archive of queer liberation, resitance, and history, alongside transcriptions of a session of oral history the artist recorded with Metcalfe exist as a series of folders on a computer. Viewers are able to sift and sort through folders, images, and text files as a they trace historical moments and intergenerational connection. This approach to displaying and presenting access did not seek to make the material easy to interpret or narrativize; often, the screen was left scattered with a previous user’s session, a new user coming into a history halfway without knowing where it began. It required effort to make sense of what was presented, troubling the past as much as preserving it.