3 PM – 3.40 PM
University of Brighton, 58–67 Grand Parade, BN2 0JY
Rachel Gilles, Nieves Mingueza, and Mireia Ludevid each engage with the archive — official, personal, and familial — through distinct practices of abstraction, fragmentation and autobiographical engagement.
Rearticulating the Archive through Abstraction examines the purposeful abstraction of archival photographic images in the British Antarctic Survey archive through Rachel Gillies‘ ongoing practice. Working in collaboration with the archive, source images are chosen which are inherently “flawed” and then re-worked in processes that remove them from their original purpose. Can destabilising the photographic image open a space to contemplate an expanded idea of that which was originally fixed: subject, time, perspective, viewpoint? Gilles suggests that through the resulting instability in the abstracted images, we can open a new and liberated space to approach the archive.
Rachel K Gillies is an artist and educator, and currently Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Brighton. She is currently creating work in collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey archive. Her research and practice look at ways photographs become abstract through mediation.
Summer, Again is an ongoing practice-based research project that explores climate grief through collage, analogue photography, archival imagery, and a fragmented visual autoethnographic methodology emerging from Nieves Mingueza‘s doctoral research. Initiated following an artist residency in southern Spain, the project investigates how ecological crisis transforms landscapes, memory, and experiences of returning home. Rather than documenting climate change directly, the project employs fragmentation as both a visual strategy and a critical method to explore forms of environmental loss that unfold slowly and resist representation, asking how expanded photographic practice can create spaces for engaging with ecological uncertainty and affect.
Nieves Mingueza is a visual artist, researcher, and educator completing a practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts London (UAL). Her research develops a fragmented visual autoethnographic approach using found imagery, archives, and expanded photographic practices to explore memory, materiality, and social justice. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Les Rencontres d’Arles and Peckham24.
Mireia Ludevid‘s artistic practice proposes an alternative relationship between the narratives within a family archive of 5,500 photographs spanning three generations (1950–2000). Activating the archive, she critiques the affective legacies of the Francoist regime’s hydroelectric policies, which flooded multiple villages including Faió, where her grandfather was born. Through an autoethnographic practice, Ludevid engages in readings and rereadings of the past to disrupt the lingering memory politics of the regime. Such an approach highlights how personal photography can create and represent culture and memory outside officiality, countering a legacy of inaccessible official archives and multiplying the sources of the past.
Mireia Ludevid is an artist-researcher working across photography, archives, memory studies, and participatory practice. Her work focuses on situated personal and social histories, engaging embodied memory to uncover alternative forms of political subjectivity. She holds a PhD from London College of Communication and a member of SCRAM! Collective.