Hybrid europeana: Notes on (Theatre) Photo Archives.

Archives are cultural practices rather than just an accumulation of historical paraphernalia. Moreover, they are characterized by a fundamentally performative nature: rather than documenting historical reality, they co-create that very same reality. This is even more true for theatre archives that document events that have since long disappeared. Taking the recently digitized photo collection of the Slovakian Theatre Institute as its starting point, this article will address different questions pertaining to one specific type of archival source, the theatre photo, while at the same time analyzing the different methodological questions relevant to these types of archival collections and the ways in which these questions are necessarily entangled with questions of national identity and cultural memory. By means of a contextual analysis of the phenomenon of the photo archive, we will analyse different questions such as the actual status of the 'users' and 'makers' of these kinds of archives, the nature of the material object to be found in this collection and the digitization of these same objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]