Althea Greenan (Goldsmiths, University of London)

My doctoral research revisits the Women’s Art Library (WAL) slide collection in the Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths using the promise of digitisation to discover the political implications of women artists making and collecting slides. Slide registries were an important strategy for feminist art projects internationally, but thirty years on, what does this slide collection of approximately 30,000 slides do? The 35mm slide was developed to store, project and disseminate images, but digitisation rendered slide-making into a redundant technology. Kodak stopped producing slide projectors in 2004 as digitisation overtook the production and management of images. Since then teaching slide collections have been dismantled while the WAL slide collection was preserved as part of a research resource. While it is widely accepted that the future of image collections is digital, the political origin of the WAL slide collection as a feminist project of visibility for women artists raises questions about the notion of digitisation as an ideal project of transmutation that ensures preservation and enhanced access. Taking up a camera to digitally photograph artists’ slide files became a way to challenge standard scanning methods. My presentation considers how the feminist slide collection continues to embody a marginalised cultural heritage that comes into view by contaminating the slide’s transition into a digital file functioning in digitised space. Political implications for cultural heritage when analogue slide collections are digitized are explored as this mostly un-digitised collection of women artists’ slides shifts from image repository to become “a site of resistance” reflecting on the nature of knowledge, culture and power. The aim of this aberrant digitisation is to question how these slides will speak in a future when the artists are gone, the feminist moment evolves, the slide becomes an artefact, and this slide collection faces the question: why keep it?

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Althea Greenan works in Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths, University of London curating the Women’s Art Library collection. She works with artists and academic researchers to realise new projects based on the Women’s Art Library collection that position the collection in contemporary practices. Her writing on the work of women artists dates from the 1980s, but her recent doctoral research focuses on the process of digitisation to ask: What can an artists’ slide collection do besides represent artwork?