The archive and the atelier, almost a hendiadys

Abstract

Marked by the inescapable knot that connects order and chaos, presence and absence, thought and classification—as Georges Perec recalled—, the atelier and the archive are two increasingly relevant places in the art system and constitute a fascinating and indivisible machines à penser with variable boundaries and evanescent perimeters. If the archive is a closed and open place, a labyrinthine and secret space of beginning (Derrida, 1995), but also a model of an artistic practice that finds self-nourishment for its own reflection in the continuities and discontinuities of the scattered traces, the atelier is the undisputed protagonist of the activation of trajectories of the archive, constituting both the premise and the outcome. Space of life and creation, «archive dense with matter and thought, laboratory and exclusive showcase but also secret place of privileged intimacies and intense negotiations» (Zuliani, 2013), the atelier welcomes a mobile plurality of times condensed into portions of past, present and future (O’Doherty, 2007), thus revealing itself as a device that welcomes and reflects the functions and geometries of the archive. This proposal, reflecting on the conceptual fabric of this hendiadys which marks the panorama of recent art, will review some exemplary cases on the Italian map, among which we recall the Vincenzo Agnetti Archive, the Giulio Paolini Archive, the Hermann Nitsch Archive Museum, all united by this double and inseparable nature.