While working on an exhibition inspired by a local historical archive, visual artist and photographer Kirstine Autzen lost her own archive and studio in a fire. The artist book How to Become an Archive is a poetic exploration of the space that emerged in the time that followed. In a conversation between Kirstine Autzen and PhD and founder of (art re.search), Sidsel Nelund, the themes of the book unfold.

Artists’ workspaces, studios, are often deeply personal refuges where new works take shape, but also where traces of the working process itself accumulate: sketches, materials, sources of inspiration, and artworks fill tables and shelves. Together, these things tell the story of the artist, either through careful organising and ongoing archiving, or through accumulations and traces left behind by the work.

An artist’s archive is built over the course of a work life in a constant movement between preserving and letting go. The ability to distinguish between what should be retained and what can be edited away is vital both to the artistic process and to the work life as a whole. If the early years are spent building up, gathering, and experimenting, the later years are often characterized by questions about precisely this distinction. But what happens to a practice when, in the midst of its unfolding, it is abruptly halted and almost all traces are erased?

The conversation will take the artist’s studio and archive as sites of preservation and explore what happens when such spaces disappear. How does one move forward after loss, and what new space might emerge between what has been preserved and what has been lost?

Kirstine Autzen

Kirstine Autzen is an artist, photographer, and curator. She holds an MFA in Fine Art Photography from HDK-Valand and an MA in Visual Culture from the University of Copenhagen. Her work engages with themes such as growth, memory, loss, and preservation as interconnected aspects of transformation and change. Through material-oriented experimentation, accumulation, and shifts in scale, she works with open-ended processes that bring together organic and synthetic materials as well as analogue and digital techniques.

Sidsel Nelund
Sidsel Nelund is a literary and art historical non-fiction writer, para-curator and cyclical agent specialized in knowledge production in contemporary arts. In 2022 she initiated (art re.search) with the aim of supporting research and creative practices through writing, mentoring and psycho-creative, experimental approaches to cyclical care and collectivity. Nelund is the author of Things in Contemporary Curating (RSS Press, 2023), which examines the use of political forums in exhibition formats.