How does one consider the archive as a space of knowledge production, rather than solely of preservation of memory? Archive and Fiction: an experiment with artists at the Public Archive of the State of Bahia (3rd Bahia Biennale, Brazil, 2014) (original) (raw)
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Revista de História da Arte | The Exhibition: Histories, Practices, Policies
2019
Editors: Joana Baião (IHA/NOVA/FCSH; LAB-GM/CIMO/IPB), Leonor de Oliveira (IHA/NOVA/FCSH; Courtauld Institute of Art), Susana S. Martins (IHA/NOVA/FCSH) The latest issue of Revista de História da Arte critically addresses the “exhibition,” not just as an object of study, but mainly as a prolific and fruitful problem. The theme is explored here from various theoretical and methodological perspectives, underlining the vital importance of exhibitions for different interdisciplinary lines of research dealing with museums, art, culture and diplomacy. This issue features an interview with art historian Terry Smith, essays by Reesa Greenberg and Rémi Parcollet, and a themed dossier that incorporates different approaches related to the topic of exhibitions, including photography, catalog production, theoretical and critical analysis of contemporary practices, reassessment of historical shows, exhibitionary impacts in the writing of art history, the role of exhibitions in the retrieval and re-exhibition of works of art. With contributions by Felix Vogel, Catalina Imizcoz, Kathryn M. Floyd, Maria de Fatima Morethy Couto, Ana Bilbao, Katherine Jackson, Laurens Dhaenens, Joana Silva, Joana Lia Ferreira, Maria de Jesús Ávila and Ana Maria Ramos. Editors: Joana Baião (IHA/NOVA/FCSH; LAB-GM/CIMO/IPB), Leonor de Oliveira (IHA/NOVA/FCSH; Courtauld Institute of Art), Susana S. Martins (IHA/NOVA/FCSH)
For an ethnography of archives and museums (Atena Editora)
For an ethnography of archives and museums (Atena Editora), 2023
Given the possibilities that the title refers to, it seems prudent to explain that this article aims to problematize what ethnography is in “archives” and “museums” and, in parallel, explore contemporary ethnographic practices. Finally, I will seek to debate, in a prospective way, ongoing modalities of ethnographic exploration of objects susceptible to being considered “in archive mode”. The proposed path involves an initial tour of the archive of ethnographic practices; then follow some of their divergent trajectories, which lead to the incorporation of “archives” as their objects and try, from there, to outline a kind of state of the art regarding this relationship between practices – that is – between the ethnographic practice of archiving and of museum.
Between Memory and Document: The Archival Turn in Contemporary Art
With the invitation to participate in the series "Untitled" at the Berardo Museum in Lisbon, I was asked to gather together a body of work from the collection that would cohere thematically. In this short book, I bring together the work of a few artists from this collection, in an attempt to probe what has come to be called "the archival turn" in contemporay art. I was able to explore this theme much more broadly in the exhibition I curated in the same museum, Between Memory and Archive, 2013.
The influence of contemporary art on the modern notion of archive
Digithum, 2013
In this article, I argue that contemporary art has played an essential role both in the transformation of contemporary archives and within the framework of the archival turn (for example, anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler discusses the archival turn in the context of colonial studies, and authors such as Terry Cook and Eric Ketelaar use the term in the field of archival science). More specifically, I will explore this influence from the viewpoint of different artistic movements before concluding with visual art and a case study of the installation Arxiu d'arxius (Archive of archives, 1998-2006), a personal archive by the Catalan artist Montserrat Soto. The aim is to analyse how art has both changed how documents are created and displayed and provided new ways of organizing information and transmitting cultural memory, especially with regard to documenting aspects of history associated with pain, oppression and war (generally drawing on oral memory) and with certain groups (women, slaves and minority indigenous communities) that have been excluded from the documentary repositories of traditional archives, whether due to institutional neglect or because they were inevitably silenced and censored. To this end, I will first offer a brief overview of the origin and evolution of the concept of archive up to the present day, highlighting the main transformations it has undergone. I will then argue that contemporary art has engaged intensively with the idea of document storage and memory. Finally, building on these premises, I will analyse the three archives included in Arxiu d'arxius that are based on oral memory: the archive of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War; the archive of American slavery; and the archive of the Aboriginal Australian community.
Revista Interamericana de Bibliotecologia, 2024
This article offers a critical analysis of the use of the term “archive” in discussions about visual arts in Ibero-America between 2011 and 2022: Why has this term gained currency in the Ibero-American art world during the last decades? What is it used for? How do artworks function when they are understood as archives? What are the main themes in these discussions? We propose to frame our analysis in four interpretive hypotheses. 1) The use of the term “archive” in discussions on contemporary Ibero-American visual arts can be understood through the model of the machine, that is, in terms of certain functions the archive performs. 2) Archives in Ibero-American visual arts have three basic functions: collecting, montaging and mobilizing. 3) Archives are communitarian machines: they emerge from communities, create communities, and require communities for their operation. 4) Archives are time machines: they shape our memory and our future. Understanding archives as machines allows us to see how artistic practices and discussions about archives in Ibero-American visual arts are linked to shared aspirations to come to terms with violent pasts and histories of exclusion, with the need to strengthen public deliberation, and the will to defend democracy. In this region, the relationships between art and archival have made it possible to read history against the grain and to coordinate the work of artists, archivists, communities and cultural managers with the concrete demands of social movements and their need for recognition. The poetics of archive in contemporary Ibero-American art is oriented towards creating the new, not towards repeating the past. Este artículo ofrece un análisis crítico del uso del término archivo en las discusiones sobre artes visuales en Iberoamérica entre 2011 y 2022: ¿Por qué ha cobrado vigencia este término en el mundo del arte iberoamericano durante las últimas décadas? ¿Para qué se utiliza? ¿Cómo funcionan las obras de arte cuando se las entiende como archivos? ¿Cuáles son los temas principales en estas discusiones? Se propone enmarcar este análisis en cuatro hipótesis interpretativas. 1) El uso del término archivo en las discusiones sobre artes visuales iberoamericanas actuales se puede entender mejor a través del modelo de la máquina, es decir, en términos de las funciones que desempeña. 2) Los archivos en las artes visuales iberoamericanas tienen tres funciones básicas: coleccionar, montar y movilizar. 3) Los archivos son máquinas comunitarias: surgen de comunidades, crean comunidades y requieren comunidades para su funcionamiento. 4) Los archivos son máquinas del tiempo: moldean nuestra memoria y nuestro futuro. Entender los archivos como máquinas nos permite ver cómo las prácticas artísticas y las discusiones sobre archivos en las artes visuales iberoamericanas están vinculadas con aspiraciones compartidas de tramitar pasados violentos e historias de exclusión, con la necesidad de fortalecer la deliberación pública y con la voluntad de defender la democracia. En esta región, las relaciones entre arte y archivo han permitido leer la historia a contracorriente y articular el trabajo de artistas, archiveros, comunidades y gestores culturales con las demandas concretas de los movimientos sociales y su necesidad de reconocimiento. Las poéticas del archivo en las artes visuales en Iberoamérica se orientan a la creación de lo nuevo, no a la repetición del pasado.
2018
Exodus Stations questions heritage, museums of material culture and their history through the perspective of contemporary art. It organises research and artistic projects that are set in natural history, history, ethnology and cultural artefact museums. Contemporary artists are invited to research in the photographic archives of these museums and follow the history of these museums and the way in which they contributed to the production of knowledge. The projects results from collaborations between artists, museum curators and other researchers. Starting from the visual archives and the way in which the objects and the history has been represented, the artists discover how historic objects have been politicised, valued, stored, transmitted and instrumentalised. The project is meant like a critical tool of self-evaluation of institutional policy, cultural and historic narrative, public education. The results of the projects are directed to museum audience, to specialised and non-specialised public. The artistic output will be shown in the museums (installations, screenings, talks, workshops) and aims to stimulate the critical reception of history and its objects. They provoke the viewer to find alternative ways in which history can be read and interpreted. Many of these installations result in devices that are implemented permanently or temporary in the museums and represent new display structures. Each project is also issuing a small publication. A theoretical edited volume is in preparation. In order to follow these intricate histories, EXODUS STATIONS proposes in each of these specific museums a case-study: joint researches where artists and museum’s curators affiliate their methodologies of work. Each case study is developed in the photographic archives of these museums and diffuses its results on a triple platform: exhibition, symposium and a small publication. Following the phase of artistic residences and research in the archives, the artists show the results of their work in an exhibition – which is included as a temporary exhibition in the museums that have been scrutinised. The small publication which accompanies the case-study aims to extract the essential questions of the research, to present excerpts of the museum’s archival material (some of it never published before) and present succinctly the artistic approach. Along with the temporary exhibition, the publication is available in the museum’s shop. In this way, these new layers of interpretation are added both to the collection items and to the existent museologic display system – and made available to the museum’s regular audience. The specificity of this project is the fact that the museum collections under examination blend material that has been collected, presented or valued either as artistic material and/or as ethnologic material – depending on various changing factors. The case-studies in these mixed collections, aim to trace the history of these fluctuating classifications and to determine the politics behind these various conjunctures of collecting – that determined the changing identity and patrimonial value of the objects. Under focus are mainly collections which have been initiated in colonial times, but also more recent collections – either from the time of Independence movements or from post-colonial contexts. Nevertheless the project is not only bound to a colonial context, but investigates also other mixed ethnologic-artistic collections which have been founded in times of political turmoil or authoritarian regimes and follows their political statement. The material under research are (mainly) visual or written sources on the history of the collections and their various forms of being exhibited: we compare early photographs that depict the images in their original context with more recent ones, shot along the object’s trading and collecting parcourse. We investigate institutional policy and cultural questions from founding texts or archival documents: images of their various display forms in time, images from the various institutions that hosted them, images that help us reconstitute founding histories of the museums and the original agendas of their founders – which themselves reflect on the collection’s identity, self-representation strategies and larger historical mentality. The project turns around issues of representation related to museology – in other words on systems of display of information and their cultural and philosophical significance at different moments in historic time. While watching various representations in time of the same objects or different ways of photographing and exhibiting the same collections, we become aware of changing ideologic frameworks and of cultural politics, of shifting scientific awareness of cultural difference, of influential personal visions and of the immense load of correlated information that every objects carries within its visible carcass. We learn also about the museum as an archive that at the same time hides and safeguards information and about the political power of visual techniques of occulting or oscillating information. Similar to the artistic practices that are part of this project and punctually intervene on specific subjects, museums – as ambivalent spaces of exotization and approximation – framing systems. They can be seen as complex dispositives that make possible a re-connotation or a partial re-invention of history. This project – devoted to the representation of patrimonial objects and to their various contexts of meaning and belonging – is mainly an exercise of methodologies. It aims to develop some techniques of analysis and display which are considered innovatory as they are the outcome of conceptual’s art own of understanding and making visible the meaning of objects. Working on a visual level (in the sense of transmitting information to the museum’s audience in a visual way) the project aims to identify methods and approaches with which conceptual art usually operates and that can be applied to critical museology. A final exhibition and publication will go beyond the information extracted from these museums’ case-studies and will be devoted to the display of these methods of distilling, interpreting and making visible to the large audience layers of critical information that surround the convoluted history of objects. This project is embedded in my research period at Collège d’études Mondiales, FMSH in Paris and its generous support. Public Full-text 1
2020
This article presents three research gestures (enlarging, dismantling and diverting) undertaken at the photographic archive of the Sylvio de Vasconcellos Photo-Documentation Laboratory, in order to highlight aspects that have established a field of debate regarding city, technique and everyday life. This was engaged upon with sources from the Photo-Documentation Service in the School of Architecture at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, chiefly from the years 1954 to 1964. The research gestures, as poetics, experimented with ways of “making the archive speak”. They also provoked sounds when they brought into discussion the ordinary life captured through photography, and the implications of this technical mediation in the practice of the city and in constructing representations and discourses. By penetrating the devices of the patrimonial archive and focusing on the historical plot surrounding the vernacular, these gestures have glimpsed critical updates of what was discarded,...
Arte y archivo, 1920-2010. Genealogías, tipologías y discontinuidades
Akal/Arte Contemporáneo, Madrid, 2011
INDEX Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction 1. THE GENESIS OF THE ARCHIVAL PARADIGM The archive’s two “machines” - The provenance archive - Freud’s psychoanalytic theory as a model of the archival system. 2. THE PROTO-ARCHIVE IN LITERARY, HISTORIOGRAPHIC AND ARTISTIC PRACTICES: 1920-1939 A first approximation to the archive: Walter Benjamin’s Passages The epistemological model of Aby Warburg´s Mnemosyne-Atlas The photographic archives - Eugène Atget, pioneer in archival photography - August Sander’s photographic archives. Art and the archive: first uses -Hannah Höch: from the photomontage to the archival album. - Kasimir Malevich and Marcel Duchamp: two versions of the proto-type. 3. THE ARCHIVE, MEMORY AND CONCEPTUAL ART:1960-1989 The conceptualisation of the archive The archive and archeology: Michel Foucault The archive and reality: memory, industry, trauma. - Bernd & Hillary Becher: archive and series - Gerhard Richter: archive and atlas - Christian Boltanski: archive and trauma - Annette Messager: archive and album From the conceptual tautology to the archive as an accumulation of data - Robert Morris and Art & Language: the archive as a tautological structure. - Hanne Darboven : the encyclopedic archive - On Kawara: archiving time - Stanley Brown: the archive as measurement 4.THE ARCHIVE, PHOTOGRAPHY AND ACCUMULATIONS: 1969-1989 Repetitive structures, inventories and classifications - John Baldessari: the archive as a montage - Douglas Huebler: the absurd archive - Ed Ruscha: the book-archive - Hans Peter Feldmann: the imaginary archive Archive and accumulation -Andy Warhol: the time capsules - Dieter Roth: an archive of waste 5. DECONSTRUCTION, CORRELATIONS AND TECHNO-CULTURAL NETWORKS:1990-2010 Jacques Derrida and “the archive fever” - The archive’s material nature - The archive’s immaterial nature Archival theories derived from Derrida - Allan Sekula: the photographic archive - Benjamin Buchloh : the anomic archive - Hal Foster: the archival impulse - Arjun Appadurai: the archive as aspiration Exhibitions on the archive - Deep Storage. Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art. - Voilà. Le monde dans la tête - Classified Materials: Accumulations, Archives, Artists -Archive Fever. Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art 6. THE ARCHIVE AND THE DECONSTRUCTION OF HISTORY: 1989-2010 Initial contributions: Susan Hiller, Ilya Kabakov, Antoni Muntadas, Vera Frenkel, Thomas Demand, Andrea Fraser Artistic typologies under the “archive fever” - Archive and ethnography: Mark Dion -Archive, archeology and photography: Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky , Zoe Leonard, Peter Piller, Joachim Schmid - The archive as text: Isidoro Valcárcel Medina - The archive, halfway between the thesaurus and the index: Pedro G. Romero, Ignasi Aballí, David Bunn - The infinite archive. The digital and virtual image: Arnold Dreyblatt, Daniel García Andújar - The meta-archive and the archive of archives: Montserrat Soto The archive´s political use and the “local memories”: Fernando Bryce, Rosangela Rennò, The Atlas Group, Francesc Abad EPILOGUE THE FUTURE ARCHIVE
The power of museums with ethnographic collections: two cases in Brazil
International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology Springer, 2024
The Power of Museums" was the General Conference on the central theme of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in 2022 (Prague). This article aims to discuss the ability of ethnographic collections to combat prejudice and promote freedom, cultural diversity, religious diversity, and democracy, among other aspects of human rights. Here, we propose a theoretical reflection on the power of museums, considering the context of the decolonization of ethnographic collections in Brazil. To illustrate the discussion, we briefly present two recent cases in the country that refer to the appreciation of indigenous, religious, and cultural diversity. The first is related to a photographic collection of indigenous peoples that is part of the Museu Paranaense (MUPA) collection in Curitiba (southern Brazil). The second case involves collections from a group of people who descend from enslaved people and members of Terreiros de Umbanda and Candomblé in the city of Rio de Janeiro (southeastern region), which is now preserved at the Museu da Republica. For this purpose, we present a brief context on the historical development of Brazil, its contemporary museum universe, and Associação Brasileira de Antropologia's initiative to map ethnographic collections in Brazil. Both cases reveal experiences of decolonizing ethnographic collections with the direct involvement of the associated communities. These cases demonstrate how it is possible to deconstruct collections This article was previously presented during the Annual Meeting of the International Committee for Museums of Ethnography (ICME), an international committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM-UNESCO) on November 22nd-23rd, 2022.
PhD thesis / University of Amsterdam / Faculty of Humanities (FGw) / Amsterdam School for Heritage and Memory Studies (AHM) Contemporary art challenges the traditional idea of a musealium as well as institutional procedures related to collection care and preservation. Conventionally, visual artworks have been perceived as fixed, unique, material entities created and finished at a particular time, and museum approaches to collecting and preserving them were established accordingly. Nevertheless, contemporary art often resists this definition and undermines dogmas of material authenticity and artist’s intent, as well as the conviction that an object’s integrity resides in its physical features. Taking as its focus the triangle of relationships between an artist, a museum and a contemporary artwork as collectible, this study investigates how contemporary artworks by Mirosław Bałka, Danh Vo and Barbara Kruger are collected, documented and conserved in today’s institutions. It looks at how (and whether) new methods developed in the field of contemporary art conservation, such as the artist’s interview, are adopted by museums, and attempts to identify factors undermining their effectiveness. By looking at contemporary art as a new paradigm of artistic practice and building on notions such as musealisation, art project as art form and art object as document, this study works towards a theoretical model that address the incompatibility between a traditional museum approach to collecting and preserving and the features of contemporary art. By employing and extending concepts introduced by conservation theorist Hanna Hölling and the notion of ‘anarchives’ by media theorist Siegfried Zielinski, this study adopts the model of the ‘artwork-as-(an)archive’. Starting from the premise that our future understanding of contemporary artworks can only be constructed through traces of documentation, this model grants documents a status equal to that of art objects and obliges institutions to care for them on a similar basis. Besides its capacity to facilitate conservation, the artwork-as-(an)archive model is here considered as a space for collaboration between artists and museums, a space to be collectively shaped, filled and nourished that fosters transparency and inclusiveness.