Presentation: Love Letters to Lost Histories (Performing Arts Heritage Network, 2021)

Citation: Alyson Campbell, Mish Grigor, Anne Harris, Stacy Holman Jones, Peta Murray, Misha Myers & Ripley Stevens, Love Letters to Lost Histories, Performing Arts Heritage Network (PAHN) Conference, 2021. This presentation explores the Staging Australian Women’s Lives project’s development of legacy letters and digital wordclouds as creative feminist archival practices. Emerging in response to COVID-19 restrictions, the project invited theatre-makers to create short video love letters to influential womxn practitioners whose contributions to Australian theatre have often been overlooked, undocumented, or erased. The presentation examines how these performative digital artefacts function simultaneously as archival documentation, affective testimony, and creative acts of remembrance, contributing to broader feminist efforts to recover and preserve women’s cultural histories.