25.06.2026: CONFERENCE QUESTIONS & COMMENTS

How can we improve the documentation of the public experience in the context of a participatory project like Deller's?

(from Christie Brown)

This is a really interesting point from Emily Stone - that institutions form an additional layer of categorisation, in relation to each other. Sitting above archive categories and frameworks or complicating them further.

How will we find current participatory works 100 years from now. Will they been found in the archive to tell future generations what were the bridges in art practice that build their present. 

Listening to Joshua Woodford & Kate McLeod I was made aware of how the clay activated a state of openedness in the completed works proposal. We discussed as a group photography as a collaborator not as a record keeper. 

An idea raised repeatedly in the morning’s sessions on participatory and collaborative practices concerned the way in which understandings of artworks change depending on the environment and circumstances in which they are viewed. Should we consider collecting such ranges of audience response as a kind of social history?

A response to Clare’s question about the afterlives of participatory artworks: hopefully there will be good archival documentation for future researchers, but this will primarily benefit specialists like ourselves – scholars, curators, artists. The most important afterlife of a participatory artwork must be in its resonance in and through the people who participated. I believe this point was implicit in Emily’s discussion – that what happens within the institution isn’t always the most important part of what an artwork is and does.

Thank you for all the thought provoking conversations. We have heard a lot about working with communities external to studio and museum, gallery walls. I’d be interested to hear about creative work within and between studio communities; within clay and crossing media. To consider studio life and activity as a transient, evolving object itself. Abigail Schama

For me, this point of Phoebe’s about fiction and creative writing being generative and expansive legitimises the case for speculation and disruption in the archive. Is it fair to say fictional records or responses in the archive offer as much meaning as ‘factual’ ones?

For phoebe- Ekphrastic writing is interesting and its potential as a mode of writing for artists as a form of documentation. It can help tell a story of a work and potentially how a person might encounter sculpture. 
I was interested in what you said about Helen Chadwick’s proposals. I would really like to know if Phoebe ever writes works before they exist? Also- Can a sculpture be a sculpture if it’s only written (maybe in the case when a work is impossible to realise ) ?

Struck by the multiple discussions on documentation, ownership, terminology and translation. Who should have the role of the translator? What happens if the work cannot be translated, and I presume, into a western discourse, and risks mistranslation? Does the responsibility lie in the creator, the viewer or the translator? What if the work translates and documents itself (or refuses) and if so, what could that look like as an alternative form of representation?

Anders said he resisted talking about the project in this focused way for many years. Could he talk about why that was?