With many hours of conceptual discussions and organisational work, TADDA, as a project, has become our academic cabaret, or perhaps it always was. It was a happening coming to life as an collective “improvisational performance” (Cowan 50) outside of authorised and traditional spaces of classrooms, conference rooms, and scholastic corridors.

Embracing a hands-on, practice-based research model, the first gathering and residency foregrounded the relationships between subject and object within archival practices. Through a series of case studies, often closely tied to the researchers’ own lived experiences, our discussions highlighted the need to engage meaningfully with the communities being studied, as well as to adopt ethical, and sometimes unorthodox, approaches to embodied and intangible archives.

Art-led workshops played a central role in the program. Through rhythmic clapping, ancestral chants, and colourful magazine cut-outs, participants collectively activated forms of practice-based research that now form part of TADDA’s archives.

But TADDA was, above all, a commitment to experimental and disruptive methodologies, which are, by all means, interdisciplinary and translocal. In all the conversations devoted to accessibility, privacy,  and exposure-sensitive materials, there was a particular attention to controlled disclosure of information, forging lasting collaborations and the sustainability of knowledge-building through intimate, small-scale public sharing in the form of Networked Intimate Publics (NIPs) and Networked Accountable Publics (NAPs).

During the three days of the TADDA residency we co-developed ways of working and shared vocabularies, fashioning a proof-of-concept for TADDA as a set of connected concepts, and a living method.

But TADDA also had an open, public-facing aspect, and this too is part of our way of working.

On its first gathering, we worked in partnership with curator Dr. Paul Couillard and 7a*mgr8, an online creative residency project for the Toronto Performance Art Collective (TPAC). A live microfestival hosted at Toronto’s Vtape, an iconic community organization mainly devoted to videoart, was one of our most significant highlights, in an evening that featured two performances from different corners of the hemisphere. Pam Hall, an accomplished interdisciplinary artist from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and Pacha Queer, a trailblazing and incendiary performance collective from Quito, Ecuador, presented works that, in their own way, explore how humanity, brutality, destruction, and regeneration intersect within our personal relationships and collective legacies. Shedding light on digital archives, including those embodied as performance art, also involves uncovering the control of narratives, access and visibility, as well as exclusions from spaces of legitimacy and the privilege of (self)preservation.

The event began with a collective feast, catered by the Palestine Bakeshop, and concluded with a Long-Table discussion based on Lois Weaver’s method –  a “public conversation” around a communal table, bringing together diverse voices to reflect on and challenge ‘The Work of the Artist-Archivist in the Age of Machinic Devouring.’ Drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s influential 1935 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ participants examined both the challenges and alternative pathways for democratising information amid the pervasive and ethically troubling proliferation of generative AI.

Photos by T.L. Cowan; notes for 1 & 3 by T.L. Cowan. Notes for 2 “the work of the artist” is by M.E. Luka (shared with permission)

While archival practices and the equitable distribution and access to knowledge and digital information were central to TADDA’s workshops and panels, we were also driven by a clear commitment to an academic practice that works at the pace of trust and scaled by the capacities of the people doing the work: a pace and scale that allows us to sustain the integrity of our way of working. And this meant paying close attention to our lived experiences, needs, and wellbeing as researchers.

Trauma-informed research approaches should necessarily include practices of self-care, as was emphasised by author, psychotherapist, and activist Farzana Doctor. In her workshop ‘Vicarious Trauma and Self and Community Care’, offered to TADDA’s participants, Doctor addressed the role of researchers as emotional processors. Profit-driven institutions and under-resourced organizations frequently share a common failure: the neglect of their human assets. Researchers working with sensitive or traumatic material whose research takes them beyond their “window of capacity,” need time and skills to regain the balance required for meaningful learning, productivity, and social engagement. In these toxic times when our labours, creativity, and recreation are always already forms of extraction (what are we extracting and what is being extracted from us?), and the society-level ethical deterioration enabled by unregulated AI, our present moment demands renewed critical attention to those who are often last on our overloaded agendas: ourselves and each other.

The collective methods that we are building with TADDA offer an antidote.