Lacunar Affections: A Study About The Poetics Of The Archive And The Anarchival Impulse (original) (raw)

2017, CIRN Prato Conference Proceeding - Special Stream: Art as Archive: Archive as Art & The Imagined Archive

The research that led to this article started at an archive and went back to it. I say this because there was an actual archive that perpetuated throughout my whole study, which was the archive of my father, who passed away in 2004. Since then – and even before I can recall - my intention in working with documents, found images, and memorabilias as plastic material has influenced both my practice and theoretical researches. For this paper, I propose a recollection of investigations that I had conducted over the last years, focusing on the possibilities of thinking new ways of investment for the contemporary artist who works with archival material. Through the figure of the lacuna – which is essential for comprehending the possibility of a poetic dimension in archives – I've researched the potentialities of the anarchival impulse as it was proposed by Hal Foster (2004), in relation with the archive fever and the archival impulse discussed by Jacques Derrida (2001). As I visited the writings of Jacques Derrida, Maurício Lissovsky, Arlette Farge, Lucia Castello Branco, Georges Didi-Huberman and Maurice Blanchot, I saw myself emerged in a sea of theories that pervades the universe of the archive. Through them, I investigated with a critical review the documental power and probatory value of archives – and of images as such. For this article, I've evoked works of contemporary artists such as Ilya Kabakov, Susan Hiller, Lorena Giullén Vaschetti, Walid Ra’ad and Cristina de Middel. Being an artist myself, it seemed perfectly natural that I should work with my own production, but never forget those who came before me.The intention of this paper is, thus, to elaborate on the affections (pathos) that images and documents of an archive recall and the gestures that they urge when we are working within their gaps.