The Story Behind the Archive: Artist Collective Bow Gamelan's Journey to ReCollecting
Photo: Eoin Carey.
In 2025, the Bow Gamelan Ensemble was selected as one of ten recipients of the Recollect: Artists, Legacies, Futures bursary programme, funded by Arts Council England and administered by DACS. This 12-18 month initiative supports artists and estates in organising, preserving, and sharing their archival work with the public. Here Artists' Collective the Bow Gamelan Ensemble write about their experiences with archiving their work.
How did you hear about ReCollect?
In 2018 we were invited to put an archive show together for the Cooper Gallery in Dundee. The exhibition was titled ‘Great Noises that Fill the Air’, the first retrospective of the artist collective Bow Gamelan Ensemble. It was a radical take on an archival display. That response and experience made us realise the extent and focus of the BGE Archive and that it needed sorting, consolidating and finding a home. Serendipitously, whilst at the Fallas Festival in Valencia, 2023, an event that had been long on the Bow Gamelan’s wish list to attend, we had an email about the Art 360 Foundation 'Recollect: Artists, Legacies, Futures’ bursaries. This offered an exciting possibility for us.
What were your aims when beginning the archiving process, were these fulfilled, or changed throughout the process?
Bow Gamelan’s archive comprised of many boxes of unsorted paperwork, photos, negatives, films, slides, tapes, sketchbooks, drawings, vinyl and ephemera. Due to constant relocating, it was becoming a problem to look after properly but had sufficient material to warrant preserving. Having been produced in the pre-digital age, it became obvious we needed to stocktake the contents as categorised list/s and then to do a basic sorting of the ‘bits’ into waterproof plastic bins and card tubes to arrest any further damage to the contents. This process, which had begun as chucking a few bits into a box at the start in 1983, without much thought for the growing collection, suddenly acquired an historical presence that made us query what we wanted from it. The enthused response at Dundee, particularly from young people, gave us the impetus to start to look for a home for the archives.
What are your key learnings from the archive process?
On a personal level we were enthralled by the comprehensive range of material we actually owned. Being pre digital the material had a unique appearance both in the paperwork and in the analogue photography. We had to give some shape to this legacy so invited an archivist, Tito Magrini to conduct a recorded survey of the amassed collage of material. On reading his report we realised we had an extraordinary history to hand over to future research/study. We had insight into the intricacies of the systems, strategies and preservation techniques needed to keep archives safe and available.
Did you discover or rediscover any material in the archive that you had previously not known about or had forgotten? Why were these/this significant?
On venturing through the material we were both reminded and amazed at how imaginative and radical BGE was at that time during the 1980’s and the huge energies exerted. Large-scale ambitious proposals, with many drawn up ideas, were discovered in tatty envelopes. We had proposals for detailed crane concerts and bold plans for a visionary event in St Pauls Cathedral. Scribbles in sketchbooks revealed designs for instruments, musical scores and concerts for movements of piles of scrap, grabbers, magnetic lifters, banging barges, gigantic megaphones hanging off cranes to pivot sound around, air balloons with bells hanging off that are played from above and arrangements for acoustic pyrotechnics lifted high in the air and swung. We felt so re-stimulated reading these that we started planning new ventures! We hope the archives similarly inspire others. The film ‘ Maps of Other Possibilities’ that we made with Alex Eisenberg, as part of ‘Recollect,’ captured and animated our connection to the early work. A couple of times we literally duet with our younger selves in the film. We showed it recently at Tate Britain where the response indicated that we had set off sparks in others.
What do you hope the next steps will be from this project?
We have managed to secure a home for the amassed material making up the archive, at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection. Not only are they permanently housing the material but also collating and filing everything to preserve in the rarefied conditions of their research space, thereby avoiding any possible damage to the collection. They will also digitalise and scan most of the sound, video and photographic work. Once sorted this extensive archive will be announced on social media and made available for researchers to use
What are your top tips for anyone starting this process?
Never lose touch with the fact that the archive is not the work but the residue of the work made in its time.
Do not let the archiving become more time consuming than the work itself
