Law, Memory, Violence

Anales de Historia del Arte Vol. 32 (2022): Art and the Archive, 2022

Emerging from a socio-political urgency resultant from the current volatile situation of world politics, this article brings to the fore the age-old question of what an archive is. Spanning through the intellectual history of arkheion and the hegemonic structure of a daunting, cohesive building that reflects the ideologies of a singular authoritarian power that created it, this article explores the parallel structures of power that exist within the archival structure, at the same time rendering its structure and being rendered by it. The shift from the unidimensional power positions to this multiplicity of exchanges that make the archival structure fluid will be studied through certain eminent contemporary archival art practices. This article proposes a topology of the archive, as a departure from studying the archive as a location, a container. The archival art practices, in this schema, are neither an external element to the archive nor a separate practice gaining meaning in discourses, but an essential element in the horizons of what the archives enact in their multiplicity. In doing so, this article will strive towards an indeterminacy of the structure of the archive, where it functions neither as a mere integration of a determinate matter in the archive discourse nor as a domiciliation of the hitherto unknown or unacknowledged documents in a new container like a museum. Leaving the discourse-oriented and material-oriented path, the action of doing will be discussed as the determinate factor behind the existence of the archive. Hence, the search for the answer to the question initially introduced, what an archive is, may only be contemplated by focusing on how archives function, as the function will be explored further as the key to its creation and sustenance.

Digithum, 2013

In this article, I argue that contemporary art has played an essential role both in the transformation of contemporary archives and within the framework of the archival turn (for example, anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler discusses the archival turn in the context of colonial studies, and authors such as Terry Cook and Eric Ketelaar use the term in the field of archival science). More specifically, I will explore this influence from the viewpoint of different artistic movements before concluding with visual art and a case study of the installation Arxiu d'arxius (Archive of archives, 1998-2006), a personal archive by the Catalan artist Montserrat Soto. The aim is to analyse how art has both changed how documents are created and displayed and provided new ways of organizing information and transmitting cultural memory, especially with regard to documenting aspects of history associated with pain, oppression and war (generally drawing on oral memory) and with certain groups (women, slaves and minority indigenous communities) that have been excluded from the documentary repositories of traditional archives, whether due to institutional neglect or because they were inevitably silenced and censored. To this end, I will first offer a brief overview of the origin and evolution of the concept of archive up to the present day, highlighting the main transformations it has undergone. I will then argue that contemporary art has engaged intensively with the idea of document storage and memory. Finally, building on these premises, I will analyse the three archives included in Arxiu d'arxius that are based on oral memory: the archive of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War; the archive of American slavery; and the archive of the Aboriginal Australian community.

In the last two decades, an increasing number of artists have engaged the spectres of colonialism that continue to haunt us in our postcolonial present. Interrupting established historical narratives of colonial domination, artists have started to address the legacy of imperialism by examining the colonial archive. At work in the archive, these artists examine the possibilities of decolonialising colonial subjectivities. Through the return, recuperation, and re-enactment of archives, archival art points to the potential of forgotten pasts and unanticipated futures lingering in the imperial archive. As the articles in this volume demonstrate, such archival interventions often serve an emancipatory agenda.

Archivaria, 2009

Dans les centres d'archives, les objets sont souvent séparés physiquement et intellectuellement des documents textuels et visuels, même quand ils font partie d'une grande acquisition de documents d'archives. Cependant, les objets, comme les autres documents, ont une valeur de témoignage et peuvent être « lus » dans leur contexte de création. Ce texte se sert d'une collection d'objets spécifique -la Magic Box [Boîte magique] de l'artiste-auteur David Wojnarowicz, qui fait partie des ses documents conservés à la New York University Fales Library and Special Collections Downtown Collection -afin d'examiner comment la présence d'objets dans des fonds d'archives complique des concepts archivistiques comme la provenance, le contexte, la description et l'enregistrement. En se servant d'un exemple concret d'une collec tion d'objets dans un fonds d'archives, ainsi que des textes du créateur de cette collec tion et des écrits théoriques provenant de l'extérieur de la discipline archivistique, ce texte explore comment un nouvel examen de la place des objets aux archives peut mener à une meilleure connaissance de la double valeur symbolique et matérielle de tout document d'archives. ABSTRACT In archives, objects are often both physically and intellectually separated from textual and visual materials, even when they arrive as part of a larger manuscript or archival collection. But like other documents, objects are inscribed and can be "read" within the context of their creation. This essay uses a particular collection of objects -the artist and writer David Wojnarowicz's Magic Box, which is part of his papers housed in the New York University Fales Library and Special Collections Downtown Collection -to examine how archival concepts such as provenance, context, description, and inscription are complicated by the presence of objects in archives. By looking at the case of an actual object collection in archives, along with both the writings of its creator and theoretical writings outside the field of archives, this essay asks how a re-examination of the role of objects in archives can contribute to our understandings of the dual symbolic and material value of all archival documents. Most archives house three-dimensional objects, and yet the status of these objects is often ambiguous. Frequently, archivists separate objects both physically and intellectually from textual or visual materials, even when they arrive as part of a larger fonds. To arrange and describe objects as something distinct from documents is to implicitly claim that they do not play a role

A radical metamorphosis of the aesthetic of storage is taking place in the media-archaeological field, which demands models for dealing with a new kind of dynamic memory. 1 What Wolfgang Ernst is meaning by this phrase, is the fact that "storage" is increasingly planned to last for a certain period of time, which appears to be getting shorter; it is therefore necessary to identify methods that can "stop", "photograph" this type of dynamic memory which is continuously updated in different formats and which is variable in time.

History in Africa, 2015

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2021

Journal of Critical Library & Information Studies, 2019

As a name, "Anthropocene" would seem to signal that this geologic epoch is both because of humans and about humans. The latter implication draws on pervasive cultural ideas about nature which underlie the Anthropocene and its climatic impacts, namely nature as an extractable, endlessly-renewable resource. While scholars in the environmental humanities, animal studies, and critical plant studies have been quick to both diagnose and propose new directions for our engagements with the material universe, scholarship on archival materiality has continued to focus on the archives as an institution for and about human intellectual endeavors. In other words, the archives continue to be an extractable resource. Within the archives, animal, plant, and abiotic changes which work against projects of human history are seen as failures, infestations, or disasters-they can never be properly archival. This essay offers a potential corrective to anthropocentric archiving, by bringing together Jane Bennett's new materialist project of "vibrant matter," Michael Marder's vegetal philosophy, and Caitlin DeSilvey's curation of decay to suggest avenues of engaging archival materiality as meaningful and provocative. As an analytic schema, this focus on the "vibrant archives" does not aim to save records from planetary changes but to begin the work of rethinking archival materiality (and its destruction) within the context of the Anthropocene.

Cinematic Intermedialities and Contemporary Holocaust Memory, 2019

This chapter is the first of this book’s analytical chapters. It is interested in non-fiction films that engage with, and more importantly appear to interrogate and manipulate, archive footage. It explores what emerges when celluloid archive footage and video or digital are juxtaposed together in Free Fall (Péter Forgács, 1996) and A Film Unfinished (Yael Hersonski, 2010) respectively. It considers what happens when past and contemporary media and images come into contact, and how this might encourage the production of Holocaust memory. This chapter interrogates theories of cinematic realism. Resisting suggestions that film can present the reality of the past, it turns instead to the real of the viewing experience to consider how its assemblage nature creates a collaborative, productive environment that enables producers, spectator, film, media technologies, individuals from the past captured onscreen, and archive materials to perpetuate memory of the Holocaust. My discussion of A Film Unfinished particularly highlights the archaeological nature of the film and how its desire to disrupt any previous meaning related to perpetrator-commissioned images can be a powerful tool for memory.

But because archive-based art essentially reuses physical traces, the extent to which much of it truly and fundamentally threatens the ubiquitous power of the archive is questionable. While it provides a much-needed counter memory and plays an essential role in analyzing historical discourse, questioning problematic representations and attracting the spectator’s attention to illusions of credibility and completeness, it simultaneously asserts the power of the archive by positioning itself in relation to it, dwelling within its aesthetic, and reacting to its narratives.