This is a low-res copy of the report on my public-facing activity for Unit 6. It reflects on my Archive of Decisions project. The next stage of Unit 6 will be to contextualise and expand on this activity through research in my thesis.
In the report, I reflected on how the framework I created engaged the public – how the invitation, context and relational nature shaped the encounter and the material generated for the archive. I also reflected on the themes that are emerging in the archive and how I navigated ethical questions around authorship and censorship in the editing of the audio interviews I conducted.
Introduction to report
The Archive of Decisions invites members of the public to contribute a decision from their life to a collective, public archive. The project was initiated in Mérida, México by me, Frances Richens – a British National – and engaged members of communities spanning locals, migrants and temporary visitors.
The Archive of Decisions is an intercultural participatory, dialogic project that explores how interventions framed through cultural practice can activate relational ways of understanding self and other, as understood through theories developed by academics and critics including Nicolas Bourriaud, Claire Bishop and Grant Kester.
Project activity included facilitating encounters, interviewing, editing, archiving and disseminating material, and was conducted across both physical and digital spaces. The archive seeks to collate multimodal expressions of life experiences, of ways of thinking and being, of memory and encounter. During the period of activity reflected on here, all archived entries were collected through in-person audio interviews and archived on a project website.
Through an invitation to share and reflect on life experiences that are universal but also wholly personal, The Archive of Decisions aims to create space for thinking about questions of personal agency, responsibility, opportunity and consciousness, and how these are informed by cultural background, building on theories put forward by Joseph Shaules.
This practice-based research builds on my years of experience supporting communications and engagement within socially engaged, participatory artistic projects within diverse communities in the UK and internationally. It aims to develop and test the resonance of my intercultural practice within my current geographic context of Mérida.
This report reflects on activity conducted in the Spring of 2026 for MAIP Unit 6, although the idea was first conceived in 2025 and it extends an earlier dialogic piece of work, created for MAIP Unit 3, on the topic of decisions.
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