Radical archiving as a feminist-led methodology in the web-platform ‘collective herstories’

My paper contribution focuses on ‘collective herstories’, a web-platform that I have recently developed as part of my practice-based PhD research at Ulster University in Belfast. The research considers three case studies - The Irish Women Artist Group, the Northern Irish Women Artists Group and the Women Artists Action Group - with the aim of articulating the crucial role played by feminist-led and women-led advocacy groups based or connected with the island of Ireland. In the absence of a comprehensive literature on the subject, the study analyses these for too-long overlooked collective self-organising practices through the exploration of personal archives and key interviews with artists collaborators. The web-platform ‘collective herstories’ further validates the research’s main objective, which is make women’s herstories visible on their own terms. The research outcomes are presented through an interactive, non-hierarchical presentation of layered resources, which includes mostly unpublished archival materials, a timeline of activities, and the research questions with excerpts of qualitative interviews. In line with the feminist-informed methodology of the research project, the design of the web-platform facilitates an experiential-driven fruition of the research’s contents, making the work of the women artists advocacy groups easily accessible for researchers, artists, and anybody with an internet access. Feminist herstories exist in an ephemeral, delicate, state: this paper draws attention on the radical power of activating and disseminating artists/activists’ personal archival practices as a necessary strategy to tell herstories, validating personal experiences and complex political/cultural identities, thus challenging discourses of exclusion and omissions of underrepresented art histories.