About Acting Archives

11 July 2015 / Acting Archives, Collaboration

Acting Archives is a collaborative project that the Institut für Raumexperimente, Berlin, initiated together with the Alle School of Fine Art and Design, Addis Ababa, supported by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. It unfolded through a series of events taking place both in Addis Ababa and Berlin. These endeavors were motivated by the desire to learn how to learn from and with each other and employed experimentation as a method of artistic research, co-producing knowledge around the topics of art and education. The events that took place in the context of Acting Archives including all the lectures and talks, case studies, discussions, and exhibitions, as well as selected transcripts and essays by the project’s participants are compiled to ensure the longevity of this initiative and a wider circulation of the accumulated knowledge. This audiovisual archive was also packaged as a media container, equipped with a set of basic media technology in order to allow students, teachers and alumni to continue working with the existing archives and to produce new artistic and educative content at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in Addis Ababa. Serving both as a content transmitter and as a research tool, this archive is accessible on site at the Alle School of Fine Art and Design in Addis Ababa, as well as via the website of the Institut für Raumexperimente. The publication “Acting Archives — A User’s Manual” appears in English, German and Amharic and serves as a guidebook through this archived material.

Acting Archives is a project by the Institut für Raumexperimente, Berlin University of the Arts and the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design, Addis Ababa University, supported by Studio Olafur Eliasson, and funded by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.