Talks
Jonas Tinius
Curating the Archival City: Awkwardness as Method
24 April 2026
This lecture explores how to curate archives, whose materials trouble institutional frameworks and ethical certainties. Drawing on the notion of the awkward archive, developed in Awkward Archives. Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum (Archive Books, 2022, co-edited with Margareta von Oswald), I consider how awkwardness can become a method for thinking about archives that resist redemption, classification, or closure. Awkwardness, as we define it, is not a fixed quality but a relational condition: it emerges through the encounter between the archival object, its histories, and its contemporary users. Focusing on two Berlin-based cases – the Hahne–Niehoff Archive at Humboldt-Universität and the Colonial Neighbours Archive at SAVVY Contemporary – the lecture examines how curatorial and ethnographic practice can confront materials shaped by racial, ideological, and colonial violence. By approaching these sites as urban and ethical spaces of uncertainty, I propose that Berlin itself can be read as an awkward archival city: a space where layered archives of ideology, migration, and dissent demand renewed practices of situated care, responsibility, and imagination.