Using Time: An Invitation for Creative Connections Between Communities and Archival Materials

The APS welcomes the public to a hybrid keynote presentation by Hali Dardar for the 8th Annual 2025 Digital Knowledge Workshop.

Incorporating archival materials into creative processes requires a unity and relation with vision, community, and archive. This can be a delicate web hewn from valuable threads of personal relation and collective will. The vast possibilities, spanning success through failure, in this process can be offputting. This presentation is an encouragement to consider ways to begin to create and express with archival relations.

Within this talk, Hali Dardar will describe a few ongoing creative projects, and explicate the elements of archival collaboration, community input, and personal vision. These experimentations span from success through failure. Discussing these can illuminate the hesitations and needs of archival patrons to archivists aiming to support creative projects, and further equip individuals with innovative ideas with guidance in archival collaboration. 

The keynote will take place on Wednesday, July 23, 2025 at 6:00 p.m. ET in Benjamin Franklin Hall and will also be livestreamed. This event is free and open to the public but registration is required. Livestream information will be provided near the event date.

Hali Dardar is an enrolled member of the United Houma Nation, and co-founder of the Houma Language Project and Bvlbancha Public Access. Her works explore interaction design, new media art, and community process. Within these roles, she crafts long-term, creative engagements to improve organizational processes and produce community affirming change. Her work supports process development, community-based design, language revitalization, indigenous media, and memory documentation. Past interaction design projects include the 2021 and 2023 Indigenous Gulf Streams, Ripple Effect’s Water Glossaries, and both the Unrecognized Stories and Language Keeper interview series.

Dardar was a 2020 Southern Artist for Social Change through the National Performance Network, a 2024 artist in residence at Sipp Culture’s Rural Performance Production Lab, a a 2024 Monroe Fellow at Tulane University, and a 2025 Self and Universe Artist in Residence at Tulane University’s A Studio in the Woods. She has previously led collaborative project management and design for Language Vitality Initiatives at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Shift Collective, and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. She holds a BA in print journalism from Louisiana State University and an MA in Arts, Culture, and Media from the University of Groningen.