CFP | Submit your manuscript for Archivo Papers 5th volume

CALL FOR PAPERS | Archivo Papers 5th volume, 2025

Deadline for submissions: October 25th, 2024

 

Archives and Contemporary Visual Art
Normalised practices and non-normative historiographies

Edited by Annalisa Laganà
Università degli Studi di Napoli "Federico II", Italy

Titled Archives and Contemporary Visual Art: Normalised Practices and Non-normative Historiographies, the next volume of “Archivo Papers: Journal of Photography and Visual Studies” aims to gather contributions on archival art and archival research for contemporary art, considering them as two complementary aspects of a broad and complex field of investigation. On one hand, the archive serves as a structural model for artists from diverse backgrounds and engaged in various fields. On the other hand, authors’ archives provide essential resources for historiographical studies on contemporary art, offering valuable information and direct testimonies. This dual focus necessitates engagement not only with the present but also with a relatively short historical span.

Since at least the 1960s, artists have been grappling with the concept of the archive, influenced by post-structuralist studies and early achievements in conceptual art. By employing tools of collection, classification, and indexing borrowed from archival theory and practice, artists explored artistic languages capable of transcending the objecthood prevalent in post-World War II art. This exploration led to the development of an expressive form that remains relevant today and is mostly based on conceptual art practices. Indeed, much of contemporary art continues to yield compelling results when its semantic and formal contents are mediated by the archival model, particularly in genres such as photography, installation and performance. Despite the vast productivity of this global trend, critics are currently challenged with defining and contextualising archival art, often working on the complexities of its heterogeneity. In what perspective, with what tools, and according to what possible definitions or counter-definitions is it possible to historicise or reinterpret archival art today? What new proposals can contemporary artists offer by drawing inspiration from traditional paradigms of archival art or inventing new formal possibilities and codifications?

These questions underscore the extensive and articulated dimension of contemporary archival art. However, while the archive serves as an artistic model, and a narrative structure, its contemporary incarnation as an institution offers a formidable resource for reconstructing recent art history. In recent years, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the author’s archive as a vital component in studies on the preservation of historical documents and art objects. Research efforts are expanding to develop criteria for the conservation and administration of contemporary art archives, describe case studies on the acquisition or museamisation of art document collections, and critically reinterpret artistic and artists’ correspondence sourced from archives of artists, critics, and scholars. Through such resources, the reconstruction of contemporary art gains detailed descriptive capacity, thanks to the archival documents containing first-hand information about artists’ studios, relationships, contracts and exchanges with patrons, family memories, and personal research contained in notebooks, sketches, photographic materials, and other repertoires. How, then, do archives speak about contemporary art? What approaches can be taken to utilise visual and documentary archives as sources for art history? How are visual archives employed in constructing national narratives and how can they be decolonised?

The 5th Volume of Archivo Papers invites scholars at any stage of their careers, as well as visual artists and other professionals in the field of visual arts, to reflect on contemporary archive-based visual arts and contemporary archival sources and collections. We welcome academic articles, Visual essays, Interviews, and Exhibition or Book review proposals, that follow the journal's submission guidelines and undertake in-depth investigation from various viewpoints and disciplines, including photography, cinema and new media, art history and theory, anthropology, museology, philosophy, cultural studies, visual and media studies, and fine and graphic arts.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• • Photographs: artworks and documents
  • Artists’ letters as a source for contemporary art history
  • Latest issues in the preservation of artists’ archives
  • Digital resources for the preservation and use of archival artistic documents: databases and online inventories
  • Ongoing projects for the recognition, cataloguing and publication of archival resources for art history in universities, museums, and other cultural institutions
  • Recent trends in Institutional critique: the value of archival documents
  • Photographic archives as a source for teaching and learning contemporary art history
  • Contemporary art practices based on the reuse and reworking of documentary and photographic archive materials
  • Political significance of archival art in today’s practices
  • New museographical issues in the exhibition of archival art and materials
  • Inventories and catalogues of archival sources as a tool for making a non-normative art historiography
  • Decolonising visual archives
  • Archival art as the subject of multidisciplinary theoretical approaches
  • Challenges and possibilities of a contemporary documentary history of art
  • Artists’ manuscripts: art history sources and museums’ heritage