Archives at Play: The Castlefield Gallery Archive and the Curatorial Project

Dukes, Thomas (2025) Archives at Play: The Castlefield Gallery Archive and the Curatorial Project. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This research investigates the archive of Castlefield Gallery through a proposed curatorial methodology. It does so via constructing a theoretical framework for the archive in the gallery, and reflecting on experiences of activating the gallery archive. Through this research, I posit the Castlefield Gallery archive as presently underutilised, arguing that it could become an active agent in a process of reflection and conversation around who and what Castlefield Gallery are to their constituents. I work through curating to critique and stimulate the archive into a more active role, using interventions to the archive, public events, and exhibitions. I situate these interventions in a theoretical framework of post-structuralism – facilitating unruly journeys through the Castlefield Gallery archive. Theories of ‘the archive’ as a powerful influence on the present form a key part of the writings of Derrida & Foucault, major contributors to the movement of post-structuralism. I consider how their writing shares a stress on the importance of shifting, societally constructed interpretations of things, rather than searching for a stable meaning to the thing itself. At any time, there is a degree of slippage, or ‘play’ (Derrida, 1966), in forming our interpretations - but I show how both Foucault & Derrida propose that interpretations of culture don’t ‘play’ randomly, they develop from existing and emergent systems – structures of validation understood as ‘archive’. In this way, the relation between present and ‘archive’ form an influence on the possibility of what can come next. Practical exploration of this understanding of ‘archive’ as applied to the Castlefield Gallery archive is the departure point for this research.