Hello. We're artists working through collaborative social practice and creative research to understand the ways in which locality is shaped and enacted in the city.

Here it is, or at least, here’s part of the physical archive, the scannable stuff anyways, from 2008-2009. It’s been hanging out in my filing cabinet for a long time, but finally with the help of Miranda Fay during her off-hours, it’s been gradually scanned in page by page.

Archives are crucial for taking stock, for remembering, for understanding a history. Given the pace with which we work, it’s rare to find the time to actually reflect on what we’ve done. Usually, this happens, in a way, when compiling images for an artist talk or presentation, but inevitably, even that process is limited by what was created by a digital source already.

331 scans from about a year and a half of work, early stencils, poster designs, and lots of hand-written notes. I can’t wait to find the time to look at all of it. And now Miranda has started on the 2010 archive. It’s so awesome to know that there’s now another copy (even if it just a digital scan) of these things.

We seem to always talk about compiling this archive into something legible, now that it’s digital, maybe we’ll be that much more convinced to attempt that process … but I doubt it. The fallout from Save the City and SRSI alone are still on our plates, to go even further back than that seems daunting to say the least.

Meanwhile, we’re planning to meet Wednesday night, and I’m really looking forward to this. It will be one of the first times that we’ll have all been together for a while and not have to talk about some aspect of admin-type stuff. Though inevitably, that will be in the mix too. Above, I’m thinking on a post-it note.

I went to the Windsor Archives at the downtown Windsor Public Library with Lee Rodney’s Border Culture class on Thursday. The city’s archives are uninsured and sit in the basement, in the same room as the water main for the building, with some record books, maps, and architectural drawings un-boxed and unprotected, though most looked to be in acid-free (though certainly not water-proof) boxes.

The map above was one of the many articles from the archive we got to see, and I think it dates to sometime in the 1950s. Interestingly, there are these areas marked as abandoned, and it made me think back to our beginnings at a Google map that marked out, among many things, some of the abandoned properties (in particular, the abandoned big-box stores).

I’m curious as to why these areas were ever marked as abandoned, though unfortunately I didn’t note what kind of map this was. If anyone has any guesses, let me know.

So, the Windsor Archives are a really interesting place if you’ve never been, and the archivist that we met with seemed very eager to help with researching. With over 10,000 photos alone, on top of thousands upon thousands of other documents, I think it’s worth exploring further.

They also accept contributions.