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Birkbeck’s Centre for Poetics and the Bury Text Festival collaborate on a National Text Archive

The Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at Birkbeck, University of London has been awarded an AHRC Cultural Engagement Award with partners Bury Text Festival to establish a National Text Archive.

The Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at Birkbeck, University of London has been awarded an AHRC Cultural Engagement Award with partners Bury Text Festival to establish a National Text Archive.

Since 2005 the Text Festival has had a leading position in the global practice of language in the arts. The festival has featured more than 20 exhibitions, significant public art commissioning, publications and numerous performances. This collaboration with the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre will archive and document the three Text Festivals so far and extend Bury’s art collection with significant acquisitions and donations from international practitioners and collectors.

In advance of the next Festival in 2014, the Text Archive project has been recognised by the National Archives as a case study for arts archiving. In addition to professional archiving of the existing material, the project involves two public events underlining the exchange between Bury and Birkbeck: a colloquium held in the Museum in May 2013, and a colloquium and installation entitled “A Report on the Archive” to be held in Birkbeck's Forum for the Arts in early July.

The project has appointed the poet and postdoctoral student Holly Pester from Birkbeck to work with Bury Council’s Archives Service to establish the new resource. Holly commented: "This archive project represents an exciting opportunity in the evolution of innovative text art practices. As a researcher and practitioner I am thrilled to be playing an active role in compiling and curating the archive’s materials and developing a project that contributes to future art practice."

Professor Carol Watts of the Birkbeck Centre for Poetics commented: “This is an outstanding opportunity to explore the creation and communication of a new internationally significant twenty-first-century archive, and to further the generative engagement between the Text Festival and Birkbeck's Centre for Poetics, which first began in 2005. It's an exciting prospect, and for us, involvement in a new kind of practice-orientated research which will have an impact for years to come.”

Tony Trehy, who runs the Text Festival, comments: “We are very pleased that the longstanding and fruitful research exchange between Bury’s Text Festival and the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at Birkbeck has been supported by the AHRC Cultural Engagement funding. The award recognises the importance of Bury as an international centre.”

The Text Archive project is supported the National Archives Council and a Cultural Engagement Award from the Arts Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The AHRC’s Cultural Engagement Fund supports valuable collaboration between universities and cultural organisations, and provides early career researchers with opportunities to develop a wide range of skills, particularly in relation to supporting the wider impact of arts and humanities research.

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