Living Meshwork: Performing Collaborative Storytelling on Photographs and Archives in the Digital Realm

The recent acquisition of the Malandrini photographic collection by the Photothek can serve as the catalyst for a critical re-evaluation of digital cataloging practices, readdressing the focus on relations and interactions within the ecosystem of the photographic archive.

This project starts from a critical assumption from the Digital Humanities: the knowledge that interconnected digital networks promise to encapsulate cannot be fully captured by a logical model. Actual knowledge, we argue, is a lived experience, shaped by the tactile handling of objects and collaborative storytelling. To capture reality more fully, we draw on the anthropologist Tim Ingold's concept of the "meshwork". Ingold argues that social life is not a static network of connected dots, but is lived along intertwined "lines of becoming". A digital network only becomes a living meshwork when it embraces these ongoing histories and real-world trajectories. In a meshwork, knowledge grows and becomes integrated through storytelling and active human encounters. Our purpose is to guide digital cataloguing through this exact progression: from thin records and static data, to a rich network, and finally to a living meshwork as a different kind of structure with trajectory, movement, lines. To capture this in practice, our interdisciplinary team is currently focusing on a case study: a filmed research encounter with objects from the Malandrini collection and the broader Photothek. The digital outcomes are designed along four steps: building the network, merging the perspectives, anchoring the network, and connecting to the broader landscape.