Instead of sifting through an archive compiled by others, we are re-reading our own: the artifacts we produced and the methods we devised across visual art, performance, dance and choreography over more than ten years, encountering a shared artistic past as artists whose relation to its material keeps shifting. The work brings together insights into how artistic practice is a crafted way of perceiving and maintaining a conversation between the artistic and the everyday, as well as into the particular blend of intimacy, distance and distortion that arises as we work back through past artistic processes and build connections between old artifacts and new ones.

We call this approach Archival Readings: a way of artistically conversing with archival material, documenting the process of making sense without foreclosing its meaning in advance, or proclaiming it as declarative knowledge. The work reflects on what arises when working through a staggered sequence of transformations: experiences of moving through two different cities translate into photographs, photographs translate into words, words translate into drawings, drawings translate into sound pieces, sound pieces translate into video. Each stage opens new sensorial and associative possibilities, allowing memory that does not belong to the archive to enter and become part of the reading. What emerges are new connections between artifacts, connections that did not previously exist, connections we choreograph rather than recover.

Scents names the attentiveness this requires: rather than approaching archival material with a classifying gaze, we follow what can be sensed, the traces and residues that resist full documentation, the hunches and bodily responses that arise in the encounter. Crevices names what this following passes through: the gaps where new meanings become possible. These gaps appear at different scales, from fissures to pores to hairline cracks, each requiring different qualities of attention and artistic methods.

For this third iteration, the work was displayed across several rooms and expanded with new elements from the archive. A 100 m² carpet bearing the traces of Approximations #1–4 (Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, 2015) was installed as a central artifact. From the remaining, untraced sections of the carpet, a sculpture was made, extending from a small space into the larger space where the traced carpet was shown, physically linking the two. Three performers, Oda Brekke, Tove Salmgren and Matilda Bilberg, were invited to enact a three-hour archival reading based on simple tasks, working live with the installed material. Two new video works were shown side by side, in which the three performers are seen drawing lines together on parchment paper layered over the video image, folding the drawing and video stages of the transformation back into one another.