Curator and research specialist, Kristin Juarez was the Curatorial Fellow at Danspace Project for the Reggie Wilson curated Platform 2018: Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance and (for a brief but crucial time) in 2019 for Platform 2020: Utterances From The Chorus. Kristin’s work with Danspace has led to her deep investment in the field of dance. She is currently a research specialist at the Getty Research Institute, working on an exhibition on Black American choreographer, Blondell Cummings.

While synthesizing collected notes gathered during curatorial meetings for Platform 2020, applied with her own critical study of archival work, Kristin developed a short writing that maps a practice—trembling archive refers to a process of collectivity, a way to be in the multiplicity of embodied presence and absence, as an act of resistance and a disruption to the record. A trembling archive is a poetic capsule of the Platform 2020 curatorial research dossier[1] and our time together. We disseminated this text to many of the Platform artists, writers, and scholars. We discussed it at length in our research groups. For me, a trembling archive serves as a methodology, a frame in which to track, to take note, to work.

— Seta Morton (Editor / Assistant Curator, Public Engagement)

A trembling archive speaks and sounds of vulnerability.

It is a collective process of gathering together those who reverberate throughout our lives and creative practices.

A trembling archive maps a collective lineage of those not in the rooms where we meet, but persist at the edges.

A trembling archive acknowledges the necessity of gathering in new formations—and its inherent incompleteness—as a vital process of thinking and being together.

A trembling archive is committed to listening to and re-sounding the voices of those who cannot be seen.

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“The idea of the trembling archive comes out of my experience reading the collective terrain/s catalogue edited by choreographers Jasmine Hearn and Tatyana Tenenbaum and [former] Danspace Project Associate Curator Lydia Bell. In her introduction, Lydia writes about trembling and her attention to the way her words gave way to sound and breath. The trembling archive has become a way for me to engage vulnerability as a formal practice, and its role in reshaping what and how we remember.”

—Kristin Juarez