Archive

Joan M. Schwartz, Jorge Blasco, Eric Ketelaar Ramon Alberch i Fugueras and K. J. Rawson

The series of talks and publication that jointly form the event we call Archive are an invitation to revisit a space and a concept that has interested several cultural communities (art, genre, anthropology, philosophy and others) over recent years: the archive.

We cannot disregard the fact that the archive has changed a part of its activity: once only a place to find information, it has now included among its tasks that of being a field of study in its own right, and at the same time a provocative concept that has brought to light important works and art practices hinging on this theme.

And yet much “archive art” has gone no further than the metaphor and has not allowed its internal structure to be portrayed as a place of creation. These metaphors have aestheticised the archive and have even constructed a genre, as in old times: archive art, on which there are even manuals.

This event calls for a different aesthetics of the archive, the sort that probes into its inner self, that moves within performativity, within ANT (actor-network theory), and produces texts that the art community cannot afford to ignore if it wants to avoid constantly repeating itself.