Georges Pfruender

School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand • Art institutions as separate entities from universities • The apartheid archives • Revisiting the idea of the archive • Archives command and have their own authority • The archives in South Africa must be visited from that point of view • Who are the archivists? Under what conditions is the archiving processes happening? • How are these archives made available to the public? • Artist William Kentridge • Hesitation around archives • Jacques Derrida – instead of being something solid, the archive should be something that holds us, something unsolved, something that needs to be addressed • Ethics are a core part in whatever we think about archives • An archive not re-performed is not a real archive • ‘White nostalgia’ – an interesting way to think around apartheid archives • Archives have agency and are not innocent things • Decolonisation is not necessarily an act that happens on a territory • How do we decolonise ourselves? • Collective memories and alternative subject positions • Methodological pluralism • Researchers should also be transformed by this process • Jeppe Street – Johannesburg • Difficult to be a migrant in an unstable setting • The sharing of stories, the exchanges of stories

Georges Pfruender, head of the Wits School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, from 2009 to 2013. From 1996 to 2009, he directed the Institute of Fine Arts, Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais (ECAV) in Switzerland, and he was president of the Swiss National Board of Art and Design from 2004 and 2008. As an artist and researcher, he has participated in conferences, panels, and residency programmes in Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia, and is presently coordinating collective art projects in collaboration with Cynthia Kros that involve researchers from South Africa, Ethiopia, and France.