Wednesday, 28 February 2018, 06.30 pm

with Astrom / Zimmer (design agency, Zurich), Philipp Messner (archivist and cultural scientist, Zurich) and Nicolas Brulhart (Archive Kunsthalle Bern)

The archive of the Kunsthalle Bern, which is highly significant in art-historical terms, has been appraised and preserved in cooperation with various experts since 2015. Over that past 100 years, an extensive and diverse collection of documents has been compiled that includes correspondences, image and film material, invitation cards, posters, publications, and much more.
The series of talks initiated by Julia Jost (Education, Kunsthalle Bern) provides insights into the archive and our work on it. During the course of our anniversary year, which not least gave occasion for the digital and analog appraisal process, archive experts will closely engage with the material to shed light on individual areas of the collection and highlight peculiarities, among each other and in dialog with the audience.

The appraisal and preservation of an archive raise numerous questions that nowadays also have to do with digitization. The start of the Archive Conversations will be made by placing a focus on the appraisal concept and the unconventional digitization solution developed specifically for the archive of the Kunsthalle Bern in collaboration with Astrom/Zimmer. Instead of a traditional digitization from A to Z, the digital reproductions are made together with researchers through their use of the documents. This will visualize research and scholarly interests as well as the thematic contexts of reception. One of the issues of this Archive Conversation is the question of how standard and experiment can relate to each other, and what happens when conservational archive practice meets the expanded possibilities and challenges of the digital.