Absent Archive (a proposal)
Posted on | September 11, 2011 | No Comments
Absent Archive
(a proposal)
Presence and absence constitute one of the basic dichotomies of the Western (philosophical) thought. Presence, as the meaning of the word suggests, is always about something dominant over something that is not there, not present.
In the same way, an archive, in the traditional sense of understanding, is hypomnesic; and hypomnēma according to Foucault (…) “constitutes a material memory of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering these as an accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation.”
But an archive is not only about the organized material presence of memory and experience, which is linked to the certain authority of knowledge, or can even become a powerful tool in legitimation of particular political issues; instead the archive is also about the imagination, the non-knowledge, desire, ..with other words – everything that is usually excluded from knowledge as unreal, which can not be represented or re-produced by the ‘archival apparatus’; something that has no (economic) value, no form nor stabilized signification.
The absent in the archive is the lived experience which can only take on the “form” of the event. The absence therefore represents a rupture in the archival structure, breaking up the absence-presence binary opposition. In return, the archive remains open to something new and different, to the activation of the present while allowing essential definitions, authorities (what is collected and what is kept, who decides, who has acess to it) and “stable abstracts” that constitue the archive to be questioned and challenged.
The aim of the Absent Archive investigation is to create a collection of “absences”, that is, a project is an attempt of bringing up to the present that which was not included in the archives for various reasons; either as a consequence of personal choices, decisions made by the authorities of knowledge, or was omitted due to the political circumstances etc.
The research on absences will focus on the various (artistic) archives* from the time of the totalitarian regimes in Latin America and Eastern Europe, from 1960s to late 1980s.
The project will look for a collective kind of memory of the repressed knowledge, desires, points of connections where yet unknown relations might be brough about. It will question an already accepted facts and structures as well as tools of research and methodologies of classifications and representation within the archive. For this reason oral inquiries will be made and which will later form a “map”. This map of absences would not make a hierarchical distinctions between statements, concepts, gestures, speech, etc instead it would “foster connections between fields, as open and connectable in all of its dimensions” (Deleuze & Guattari).
It will become an event in itself.
Bojana Piškur (REC), 1 September 2011
* Archives to investigate: this of course would again demand of us to think of the ways / methods on what archives to research.
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