Contemporary art practices and art historiography facing the question of archivability

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15756908

Keywords:

Archive and Contemporary art history, Art processes, Art documentation, Participation, Performance

Abstract

The multiplicity of contemporary art practices makes us reflect on their archivability, on the role of “institutions”, and of a differentiation of creation and production contexts which today constitute the contemporary art field. The temporal dimension, between generative and growth processes, memory, forgetting and removal, and that of the ephemeral, and the transformative, emphasized by the role of media as “sensitive environment” is transforming the archive which should embrace the complexity of the documentary flux, its continuum and “materiality”.

The paper, starting with a mapping of the debate on art and archive, aims to reflect on the interrelations between artists, institutions as museums, formal and informal communities involved in participatory-based projects, just to verify, starting to the specific contexts, how the changing panorama of artists’ practices is modelling the archive and viceversa, and if such conditions could induce historians to question the archival principles of evidence, provenance, integrity, authorial.

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Author Biography

Francesca Zanella, Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

Francesca Zanella associate professor of History of Contemporary Art (University of Modena and Reggio). Member of the Scientific Committee of CSAC, University of Parma, directed from 2015 to 2020, member of the Scientific Committee of MoRE Museum of unrealized projects, member of the IUAV Bites research group.

The main areas of research are history of exhibitions and arts archives. She has curated exhibitions and artist’s residencies projects. She deals with contemporary archives, and digitization projects and enhancement of design archives.

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Published

01.07.2025

How to Cite

Zanella, F. (2025). Contemporary art practices and art historiography facing the question of archivability. Archivo Papers, 5, 65–83. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15756908