In my contribution I present the digital platform titled “the archive that i imagine to unlearn the archive” (work-in-progress) and reflect on it as both an arts based research methodology (Eisner Elliot W & Barone Tom, 2012; Hernández, 2008) and a research output in the history of education, particularly connecting with creative history approaches (Ross & Stockman, n.d.; Twells et al., 2023). The digital and open-access archive is continuously constructed through what I have come to term a performative-archival practice to research object lesson picture books that were employed as educational technologies, amongst others, in Switzerland, Germany and Portugal in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries (Scheuermann, 2024). The archival entries are produced by me, the promoter of the archive, as well as in participatory workshops. The workshops are directed at an interdisciplinary and not strictly academic audience.

In this presentation, I reflect on the 2-day workshop PerformArquivo – uma prática performático-arquívistica (PerformArquivo – a performative-archival practice) which took place in May 2024, at the rehearsal space of the object theatre company Teatro de Ferro in Porto. The 14 participants were students, professionals and researchers from the fields of visual and performing arts, filmmaking, music and arts education. In this workshop, I proposed an array of exercises to construct the archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive that I will delineate in my contribution including reflections on (1) their onto-epistemological implications and (2) challenging and unexpected outcomes.Examples of these exercises are the reenactment of an image to study how the act of seeing was “scored” by that image [on the term “score” see methodology section] and the experimentations with strategies such as tracing, fragmenting, superimposition and reassembling, deploying semi-transparent papers in order to shape images and narratives that dialogue with/question/comment on/reject those of the archival materials. At the end of the workshop, I handed out a worksheet on “positionality” with questions that aimed to make the participants reflect and articulate their social identity in relation to the archival materials and their interactions with them during the workshop. The production of situated knowledges and the stating of the position from which I speak turned relevant for me through postcolonial and feminist research on archives and research generally (Azoulay, 2019, p. 176ff.; Haraway, 1988; Ribeiro, 2020). Linked to the question of diverse positionalities, I will reflect on the ethical implications of participation in arts based archival practice and how the multiple, partially conflicting contributions of the participants could emerge as part of the research and, eventually, the challenge of practicing “epistemological humbleness” (Eisner Elliot W & Barone Tom, 2012, pp. 133–134)

The performative-archival practice developed by me is a mode of archival engagement that combines arts based research with critical inquiry, that seeks to unlearn the imperial and historicist authority of archives and archival methodologies. Rooted in a decolonial and postcolonial understanding of unlearning, this practice aims to challenge the hegemonic structures within archival research by engaging with archives as sites of contested historical production and methodological plurality (Azoulay, 2019; Dhawan & do Mar Castro Varela, 2009; Sternfeld, 2016; Zaayman, 2023). Through performative, video-, photography- and visual arts-based methods such as re-enactment, tracing, projection, and narrative re-assemblage, the performative-archival practitioner enacts archival documents as “performative programs” (Fabião, 2013) or “scores” that invite creative exploration of the archival documents in an “undisciplined” manner (Rigney, 2007; Twells et al., 2023). Such an arts based approach foregrounds the embodied, subjective, affective and collaborative dimensions of engaging with archival materials and thereby enables enhanced perspectives and adds nuances to both the understanding of what archiving does and of the pictures books that are being studied through a varied, non-discursive set of practices (Hernández, 2008, p. 94). By ‘doing the archive‘ in a reflexive manner (Rogoff, 2003; Schön, 1991), the performative-archival practice incentivises a continuous reimagining of what we come to know through archives. The archival materials which function as the “scores” or “performative programs” are two picture book series of the so-called object lesson method that were deployed to teach children ‘about the world’, to teach them ‘how to see’, i.e. training their senses, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in imperial Europe (Germany, Switzerland and Portugal) (Staub, 1904, 1874-5/1923; Walther, 1889, 1891b, 1891a). The picture books and their method mobilise an intricate net of positivist approaches to images, white imperial subjectification, patriarchal societal norms and a particular notion of “nature” that was core to modern education at the time. By studying the picture books through arts based methods that work through visual and performative modes, I seek to deepen the understanding of how the hegemonic power structures played out visually and thereby potentially allow for a more complex and nuanced take on how they continue/discontinue/shapeshift/being troubled/being transformed today.

This contribution presents the digital platform “the archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive” and introduces the performative-archival practice through which the archive is constructed as an arts based research methodology in the history of education. Through the reflection of the workshop “PerformArquivo – uma prática performático-arquívistica”, I exemplify exercises of the performative-archival practice and reflect on their onto-epistemological implications and the knowledges produced through such an arts based approach to archiving and the archival “scores”, namely object lesson picture books. Following, I reflect on ethical considerations about how to account for positionality in participatory research settings and how the multiple, partially conflicting contributions of the participants could emerge as part of the research and the challenge of practicing epistemological humbleness as an arts based researcher.

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