The highlight of the opening event for me was Carla’s musical performance: an original thirty-minute set of compositions and improvisations created from her work with the Scottish Sound Archive to consider non-visual representations of place and to showcase another University Collection. It was captivating, moving, and resonated beautifully with the themes of the exhibition.
I was also, however, reflecting on how Carla’s performance resonated with our brief overall. We had initially decided to commission a performance due to the brief’s outline that we should “[program] associated events,” but Carla’s performance—as well as the process of commissioning it—ended up addressing several of the brief problems as well.
The second “general” brief problem asks: How can we create experimental programs and activities with institutions that achieve a balance between “fit” and “challenge”? Carla’s performance and experimental use of the Sound Archive introduced a “third” institution to our project.
This process of integration also linked to our first brief problem: What is the purpose of the Art Collection, how should it be used, and who is it for? In this instance, Carla demonstrated how creative interventions can use these institutional archives and collections as sources of inspiration for contemporary projects.
There were also interesting parallels between our navigation of constraints with the Art Collection and the Travelling Gallery, and Carla’s navigation of constraints with the Scottish Sound Archive, addressing the question: How can we navigate constraints, including accreditation standards, stakeholder interests, spatial limitations and audience needs, in order to promote engagement with our holdings? Much of Carla’s work with the Sound Archive involved navigating the complexities of copyright access. This highlighted for me a parallel between her experience and that of encouraging public visitors to access the Art Collection: the tension between promoting engagement and the difficulties of accessing that material to engage with it.
I was particularly moved by Carla’s integration of a “Unknown Air” she was inspired by from the Sound Archive. There is a challenge to working with collections that have limited recorded knowledge of many of their items; but Carla’s performance demonstrated how not just a research approach, but a creative one, can create something beautiful from these gaps.
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