Roundtable Statement

Second Summit on New Media Art Archiving
June 11, MACBA – Convent dels Àngels. Roundtable

Keywords: Ethics, archives, agency, visual literacy, care

Encouraging self-critical and self-reflexive perspectives, this roundtable invites users, artists, curators, and scholars to confront the complex and often ambiguous ethics vis-à-vis the subjects of new media art archives and to recognise our agency as well as complicity in ethical transgressions as equally responsible viewers and listeners.

In recent decades, new media art archives have multiplied and diversified across digital networks and online platforms, contributing to the creation of instant and unruly archives that often emerge in unforeseen and involuntarily ways. Concomitantly, our relationships with archival documents, new media, art institutions, and the historical, social, and political realities they pertain to have changed. Based on case studies discussed in previous panels, this roundtable addresses participants, first and foremost, as viewers themselves to think about how visual and archival literacy can be disseminated in order to respond to this unprecedented proliferation of new media art archives in more critical and engaged ways. Beyond questions of authorship, ownership, copyright, and consent, we will address issues around responsibility, authority, dignity, colonialism, and care to draw out the differences between performing and practicing ethics in and of new media art archives. Encouraging self-critical and self-reflexive perspectives, this roundtable invites users, artists, curators, and scholars to confront the complex and often ambiguous ethics vis-à-vis the subjects of new media art archives and to recognise our agency as well as complicity in ethical transgressions as equally responsible viewers and listeners.

• Lisa Deml (DE/UK) is a Midlands4Cities funded doctoral researcher at Birmingham City University. She holds degrees in Art History and Philosophy from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. Initially trained as a journalist, she subsequently worked for public cultural institutions and non-profit organisations internationally, including Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, Haus der Kunst, Munich, and Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. Her research interests focus on visual articulations of citizenship, particularly in the framework of documentary and new media practices in the Middle East and North Africa.
• Nathalia Lavigne (BR) is an art writer and curator, a Ph.D. Candidate at Architecture and Urbanism College, University of São Paulo (FAUUSP), and a former visiting scholar at The New School. She is a contributor to Artforum International, Contemporary And (C&), Folha de São Paulo, among others; and has an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies from Birkbeck, University of London. Among the exhibitions she curated are Against, Again: Art Under Attack in Brazil (2020) at Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, New York; and Disappearance Tactics (2021) at Paço das Artes, São Paulo. She is currently a visiting researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and has been awarded a DAAD scholarship in 2021.