Unmaking the Archive is a hands-on group workshop that I have developed as an experimental attempt to decolonize my Fine Arts teaching and as an intervention within institutional cultural spaces (such as schools, archives, collections, and museums). This facilitation has been offered in numerous settings over the last decade and has been inclusive of students and the broader public. In 2023, a detailed description and step-by-step instruction of the the workshop was published by in the The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art, Craft, and Visual Culture Education.

ABSTRACT

Museums, galleries, and departments of visual arts all have a responsibility to foreground Indigenous voices and practices into previously exclusionary spaces. This chapter will present one approach to doing so, describing a pedagogical intervention offered to undergraduate students in Studio Art and Visual Culture. The chapter outlines a collective learning activity, where learners engage in interpretive meaning making via a co-design activity. The overview of this learning activity is positioned within the scholarship of decolonial teaching and provides photo-documentation of previous activity outcomes. The chapter describes how groups are assembled, provided with specific materials, and tasked with collectively organizing artistic presentations, followed by strategic interpretive critiques of presentations, which has been facilited in both classroom and archival/museum settings.