Research into practice in the affective information comic

Abstract

ABSTRACT The ‘archival turn’ describes the way in which political, memorial, legal, and social issues have been explored by archive professionals and amateurs, as well as theorists across the humanities, including legal scholars and indeed, creative artists. Together, their work has sought to explore the archive reflexively, attending to the interests that come to bear upon its formation and role determining what counts as knowledge and how that plays a part in managing our access to the past. This article discusses Golnar Nabizadeh and Catriona Laird’s Archives as Memory as an ‘information comic’, exploring how this short work can be understood in terms of its particular contribution to this ‘turn’, in which the archive and its function has come into focus. It unpacks the rather banal and didactic connotations of the term ‘information comic’ in favour of an understanding of Archives as Memory as a form of research-led creative practice detailed in its singular approach.