Archivo Papers

Archive and Conflict

Anna María Guasch — 2024-06-27

The collaborative project 'Archive and Conflict: Archives and the Techno-Aesthetics of Datafication' between the Archivo Platform and the Global Art Archive Research Network (Universitat de Barcelona) has resulted in the publication of this journal volume. It explores the dynamic nature of archives and the significant role of photography and other lens-based media in shaping our understanding of historical and cultural legacies, especially those related to conflicts. By investigating the convergence of documentary sources in both analogical and digital archival contexts, and the ways in which they express imaginaries, representations, and memories, this volume seeks to elucidate the complex mechanisms that influence our perceptions of the past, the present and thus the possibility of realising more equitable futures. Through this exploration, contributors examine how archives serve as indispensable tools for comprehending, preserving, and reinterpreting cultural and historical narratives related to conflict events.

Exploring the 'Slow Archive'

Pablo Santa Olalla — 2024-06-27

This interview with Sven Spieker explores the characteristics of his theoretical proposal known as the "Slow Archive". Introduced in his "Manifesto for a Slow Archive" (2016), it offers an original approach on the relationship between contemporary art and the archival device. The discussion delves into various topics, including temporality and speed concerning contemporary archives in the Internet age; the processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the aura and their impact on archives; as well as strategies for slowing down the rapid flow of information, such as manipulating digital obscurity or navigating the boundaries between truth and fiction.

Picturing Historical Absences

Ana Catarina Pinho — 2024-06-27

In this interview, Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige discuss their artistic practice on historical narratives and memory, particularly regarding their approach to the wars in Lebanon. By critically appropriating and scrutinizing archival materials, their work challenges dominant narratives, revealing historical absences that would otherwise be forgotten. Delving into the complexities of the past, the artists explore how history shapes identity and informs contemporary discourse. Through this dialogue, Hadjithomas and Joreige reflect on their artistic process and the transformative potential of art to foster critical reflection and promote more just and compassionate futures.

By an Eye-Witness

Arola Valls Bofill — 2024-06-27

Azadeh Akhlaghi is an Iranian photographer and filmmaker. Her work 'By an Eye-Witness' adopts the strategy of staging events that span a 90-year time frame to embody the collective memory of her country. By depicting scenes that feature the violent, traumatic, or controversial demise of poets, journalists, students, intellectuals, or political activists, Akhlaghi leads us to the realm of the sensible and lived experience.

Independence Days

Ana Catarina Pinho — 2024-06-27

Maryam Jafri’s portfolio features three bodies of work that explore archival imagery in relation to cultural and historical representations, addressing the interplay between material and digital archives, and focusing on the preservation and disappearance of images from historical narratives. Jafri’s artistic practice combines found and original material, emphasising extensive research-oriented methodologies while also exploring the roles of chance and intuition in the creation of the final works. Her projects "Independence Day 1934-1975" (2009-2019), "Disappearance Online" (2021), and "Getty vs. Ghana" (2012) exemplify this approach. They investigate subjects such as decolonization processes in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, revealing similarities in Independence Day ceremonies orchestrated by departing colonial powers, as well as the digitization of historical images and the implications for cultural memory and copyright law.

Archive, Record and Power

Anna Maria Guasch — 2024-06-27

The archive has long been a recurring theme in contemporary art, yet it was not until the early 21st century that a prominent shift towards considering artworks "as archives" emerged. The archive, both as an institution and a metaphor, has assumed a central role not only in cultural discourse but also in creative practices, intersecting with significant social events. Digitisation has further expanded storage possibilities, facilitating unprecedented information mobility across various cultural and social spheres. More recently, curators of global biennials have also considered the archive as a productive space of conflict, creating an open framework in which the archive enables the creation of new relationships. This illustrates how spaces of knowledge can be devised, developed, and designed. Hence, this new concept of "the productive archive" is crucial, revealing itself as a space where documents and testimonies serve as a platform for productive dispute and struggle.

Strategies of critique in contemporary artistic archival practice

Sara Callahan — 2024-06-27

This essay proposes that selected artworks by Katarina Pirak Sikku, Kader Attia, Michael Rakowitz, and Kajsa Dahlberg exemplify a set of approaches within contemporary artistic practices that operate in ways that simultaneously align with and deviate from the main tenets of the “archival turn” in contemporary art. The author suggests that these artworks involve indirect reconsideration of what critical archival practice can involve. All four artists deal with specific instances of conflict, marginalization, and forms of oppression by actively reframing the confrontational, suspicious and undermining strategies that has characterized some archival discourse. The essay shows how these artistic practices stress notions of care, repair, empathy and permeability in ways that have specific methodological and conceptual consequences. By doing so they invite a rethinking of critical archive theory in the face of specific question and concerns of the current moment such as how to handle remnants of racist histories in present-day archives; the need for recycling and repair in the face of the environmental effects of rampant consumption; how to address those who hold diametrically opposed political position from oneself; and how to take serious people whose bodies operate in ways that tend to marginalize them as non-productive in the face of neo-liberal values like professional success and self-sufficiency.

Horror Vacui

Paul Grace — 2024-06-27

Horror vacui – the fear of the void, is overcome in the two instances of counter-archival practice examined here: Real Pictures, an installation by the artist Alfredo Jaar, and Holocaust Museum, by the poet Robert Fitterman. Both works have at their center, photographs from the realm of atrocity that are, in different ways, rendered invisible to viewers or readers – a representational void is staged. This article is an exploration of the implications of this perverse mode of representation. The archive, conceived here following the Foucauldian idea, as an engine of epistemic regulation has one of its primary mechanisms – the binding of text to image – removed. The resulting (counter-archival) effect is the disruption of superimposed logic, and the opening up of both invisible image and decontextualized words to active forms of imagining.

Historical narratives, (Counter)visuality and Modernity

Michael Thomas Rowland — 2024-06-27

Taking Walter Benjamin’s conception of history as a discipline concerned with “the precise dialectical problem that the present is called upon to resolve”, this article considers the ways in which contemporary applications and conceptions of visual images and practices are being used to expose, challenge and replace modernity’s historical narratives and its material realities. The work of architect, artist and researcher Paulo Tavares is used as a case study in order to elucidate how projects combining critical engagements with the visual archive, the appropriation of lens-based technology and the incorporation of non-western are used to secure legal changes as well as changes in the way we think about and conceive the collective. In view of Tavares, Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of visuality – that is the West’s “visualization of history”, a “discursive practice that has material effects” – is employed in conjunction with insights from the African(-diasporic) intellectual tradition. This facilitates contextualization of the colonial roots of modern means of visualizing in light of how to repurpose them for decolonial, emancipatory and ecological ends.

Femicides of Mothers-Territory

Daniela Cifuentes Acevedo — 2024-06-27

From a gender studies perspective, this paper focuses on understanding Aby Warburg's proposal of a Mnemosyne Atlas as a living archive, with the aim of elucidating the potential and limits of this methodology of collecting and organizing images as a tool for rethinking a patriarchal past.

Following this guideline is taken as a case of study the photographs published in the book La Violencia en Colombia - estudio de un proceso social, sexual, and gender violence registers occurred in the context of the war in Colombia. These images show how women and their bodies, in the context of a patriarchy exacerbated by the war, become repositories of violence by being codified as territory and origin of life. These photographs are the axis of a Mnemosyne Atlas, considered an archive, that compiles works of art from other contexts and temporalities that dialogue with the woman-land-life relationship.

These collected documents will serve to define the limits and possibilities of the archive, as a form of montage that allows us to reformulate the narratives of the past and make historical gender biases visible. However, a final section focuses on highlighting the caveats that gender studies can pose to Aby Warburg's methodology.

Photography, Montage and Archive

Gustavo Balbela — 2024-06-27

The far-right turn in Brazilian politics led to the re-emergence of an armed ghost, one that has been hindering our political agency since the dawn of the republic, but that had been hidden for a few decades. This essay will frame the archive as an important instance within the artistic practice I've developed as a response to apparition of this military monster during the Bolsonaro years. In a body of work called Concrete Witnesses Inquiry I have combined images and texts (collected mostly from the press) with an urban landscape photographic work that presents overpasses built in my hometown, Porto Alegre, during the 1964 military dictatorship. Following authors such as Georges Didi-Huberman and Allan Sekula, I suggest that the archive can be seen as a central axis in this process, allowing me to connect otherwise unimportant elements from the urban landscape with violent historical processes, often considered distant and abstract.

Queer Futurities

Diego Marchante "Genderhacker" — 2024-06-27

"Gendernaut. Queering the future" is a project clearly influenced by queer theories, transfeminist activism and science fiction. It displays a reflection on the potential of various strategies related to accessibility, distribution, socialization and playful reinterpretation of feminist and queer archives. The creation of archives, software programming, audiovisual production, performing performances or developing games thus become artistic strategies for energizing archives, and have a clear desire to make archives that address the memory of people more accessible. feminisms and dissidents of gender and sexuality. Through transmedia and performative experiences, we conceive the archive as a living interactive space, free of heteropatriarchal codes, inhabited by multiple bodies and subjectivities that relate past, present and future to come.

Permeable membranes

Amalia Caputo — 2024-06-27

This study examines three large photo-based installations in which the role of memory construction in photography is explored, with emphasis on the concept of image accumulation in the digital era. These installations aim to restore photography as object while exploring the immersive and experiential qualities of physical environments filled with images, in opposition to the digital experience through screens. The visual essay delves into the evolving relationship between photography, the archive and its transformative nature, as it transitions from a digital transient realm, and returns to a physical manifestation (Art Installation, Atlas). The focus on building thematic “Atlases” that serve as spaces for interpretation, draws inspiration from Georges Didi-Huberman’s take on Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. The works created aim to contextualize the symbolic universe of images, and the construction of visual atlases as historical archives creating permeable and tangible membranes that provide evidence of our contemporary visual experience.