These workshops take the appointment of an archivist for the first time to Arnolfini, the centre for contemporary arts in Bristol, as an opportunity to explore issues and questions relating to the archiving of contemporary art exhibitions, live art and other forms of intangible, or event-based culture. Using raw materials gathered from the past forty-five years of Arnolfini's programmes, the workshops will bring together archivists, theorists, artists, historians and members of Arnolfini's audience to explore a series of interconnected problems and questions.\n(titles are working titles to indicate content)\n\nWorkshop 1: Audience Memories\nWhat is the role of memory in relation to history? Focussing on two events (performances or exhibitions) from Arnolfini's archive (one long past, one from the recent past), this workshop will explore and record audience memories of those events, using the expertise of oral historians and theorists of memory to address how these memories are to be elicited and included in the archive. \n\nWorkshop 2: Digitisation and Remediation\nMedia theorists, archivists and artists will address the role of media in preservation, how the artwork changes through its translation into a different medium, the materiality of the archive and the impact of digitization. Issues explored will include questions of decontextualisation and remediation. The workshop will also consider the potential of on-line software for user-led archiving, through which users of an archive can examine others' selections from the archive, and ask what is the significance of this for hierarchies of knowledge, and the relationship between archive and text/exhibit.\n\nWorkshop 3: Time and the Artwork\nThe third workshop will consider questions relating to time and the temporality of the artwork - notably the irony and ethics of preserving work which is part of a modernist attack on the museum, the archive or the art market and which is intended to refuse either commodification or archiving by having a built-in half-life, being designed to decay or to exist only in the present moment. \n\nWorkshop 4: Repetition and Reconstruction\nThis workshop will examine the uses of archival material in restagings and reconstructions either by the gallery or the museum or by artists' themselves. Questions of authenticity, the relationship between the real and the copy, and the changes in audience experience, will all be addressed. \n\nIn all the workshops, archival materials relating to specific events will be used as case studies and added to during the session, and the workshops themselves will be recorded and become part of the archive. The workshops will be held over four consecutive months and participants will be a combination of invited participants from regional museums, art organizations and archives, invited international theorists and artists, and an open call for participation from members of Arnolfini's audience. The discussions that result will influence the ways in which Arnolfini's archive is developed for the future.\n

Many archives of live art and performance have been or are being produced, as this contemporary form becomes valued by museums or collections internationally gaining significant cultural capital. AHRC funding has or is enhancing a number of key resources, through conservation, cataloguing and digitization, making them accessible to potential user-groups: e.g., Bristol's recently completed project to digitize the National Review of Live Art Video Archive and the award for 'It was forty years ago today...': Locating the Early History of Performance Art in Wales 1965-1979. Performing Documents will research and facilitate a further significant advance in the understanding, engagement with and use of these archival materials and performance archives more widely. Where traditional scholarship has tended to appraise archives in relation to art-historical narratives and read documents as the textual remains of past events, this project will produce models for the investigation of this archival material through practice-as-research. Thus the project will advance an understanding of existing archival holdings through their relationship to current and future creative practice, in ways that will deepen academic, professional and public engagement with what remains of this ephemeral work. Specifically, the project will explore the potential for knowledge transfer from the Live Art and Arnolfini Archives; it will develop practical models for the future use of this material for a wide range of communities of professional users, including scholars, practitioners and curators. It will also develop strategies for the exhibition of these materials and ephemera, such that culturally significant, event-based art can be understood and communicated across generations of artists and scholars, as well as to a broader public.\n\nPractical approaches to historiography will be explored through three distinct dialogues between renowned professional practitioners and scholarly practitioner-researchers, and between academic and cultural industry partners. The first workshop will focus on artists' re-use of their own archival materials; the second on artists' use of other artists' documents; the third on the exhibition of documents and performance ephemera using curatorial practice as its mode of enquiry. Each enquiry explores a distinct approach to engaging with these documents: they model a set of experimental tools for future creative use and re-use. The project will enable audiences, scholars and professional practitioners to access these workshops through a series of symposia and showings, which will make these processes public, alongside ongoing online documentation. The third workshop concludes with a two-day conference that will be synchronized with an exhibition and performance of selected outcomes. This will draw out and make public significant discussions and comparative reflections from the previous symposia and add a wider call for international academic engagement with the project's questions. A co-authored and edited book, combining DVD, will compile documentation and reflection on the practical inquiries, essays from the investigators and developed conference papers. Published by a leading publisher, this will be distributed internationally across the various sectors involved.\n\nCollaboration between the Department of Drama & Theatre Collection (UOB), the Drama Department of Exeter University & cultural-industry partners Arnolfini & Inbetween Time Productions (Bristol) will provide extensive access & dissemination to the various academic & creative-industry constituencies as well as major public engagement. The project's impact will be enhanced by its exhibition and performance outcomes being included in the Arnolfini programme and Inbetween Time international festival of live art (2012). This festival will include a contextualizing archivaldisplay and additional commissioned re-enactments by national and international artists.

The 'University of Local Knowledge' (ULK) is a community project that celebrates local skills and knowledge, helping community members to value and spread their knowledge which in turn will aid community stability. The project has the full support of the local community, and is led in part by a steering group of community representatives. Working with artist Suzanne Lacy, KWMC has begun to capture film clips, or 'classes', in which residents share expertise and co-construct knowledge through events and performances.We will build on this foundation by developing technologies and techniques that help us scale up and study community skill and praxis. The University of Local Knowledge will bring together KWMC and the Knowle West community with a team of academics, artists and educators to study the deployment and use of technologies and techniques to collaboratively develop knowledge to enhance our understanding of the relationships between physical and digital community. We will help capture skills in a University-like structure in order to teach and publicise to others within and beyond the community; individual 'classes' will be assembled into programmes of 'study' that will be housed in 'departments' and 'faculties'. We will build systems through which further 'classes' can be added and pedagogic structures can be changed by contributors. We have chosen University as a deliberately contentious metaphor to provoke debate around what constitutes knowledge and why values are placed on different spheres of expertise. These 'classes' will be films/videos of Knowle West residents describing how to do something that they are an expert at; KWMC have captured an initial pool of examples which can be used to populate ULK. The resulting ULK structure will be visualised as a network of classes, departments and faculties. We will implement such structures within an online web service, and allow users both to comment and upload new classes, but also allow experienced members to adapt and 'mash up' the structure of ULK itself in order to better organise or present programmes of study. These web services will also be displayed in physical installations deployed within Bristol. In addition to configuring programmes of study we will convene a series of events including a conference with 'seminars' arranged in local sites, including shops, libraries and homes, with academics and local experts paired in conversation.

The Social Mobility Innovation Partnership (SMIP): city regions will bring together community partners, policy makers, city leaders, local industry and researchers to analyse barriers to social mobility, establish which can be most effectively tackled in a local context, and then co-create effective interventions that seek to make a real impact on those barriers. The SMIP will be established within the Greater Bristol city region, reaching out through its national partners and the LPIP Strategic Coordination Hub, to Core Cities across the UK. Our ambition is for the SMIP to deliver a programme of activity to promote social mobility and enable neighbourhoods and communities to develop and thrive, in turn supporting inclusive and sustainable growth in city regions. It will operate via three thematic lenses: 1. Access to education, skills and meaningful employment opportunities 2. Sustainable living and places 3. Culture and identity The project will adopt a participatory iterative research design. In Phase 1, the Partnership will explore the needs and opportunities for collaboration across all three themes through data gathering, landscape and evidence analysis and a series of workshops, chaired by co-investigators from key community groups. It will take a deep dive into the theme of 'Access to skills and employment in the green economy', applying learning and a 'what works' approach to the establishment of an appropriate model for Phase 2, as well as drawing on Bristol's extensive track-record in Connected Community approaches. The proposal has significant local and national support from senior political, academic, professional, and community leaders. It has the potential to transform the futures of disadvantaged and minority communities in the Bristol city region, influencing social mobility and inclusive growth in city regions across the UK.