Joan M. Schwartz and Jorge Blasco
Thursday 9 March, 7 pm. Espai 4
Free entry. Limited places

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 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.

Archives, truth and power

Over the last 35 years, archives have gone from being sources of documents to subjects of study, and archivists have had to adapt to technological and intellectual upheavals from both within and without the profession: fundamental changes in the nature and scope of human communication; the shift from analogue to digital records-creation and record-keeping; and a public/self-image that has gone from passive to powerful. In this lecture, Dr. Joan M. Schwartz will draw on her experience as a photo-archivist to offer some observations on the ways in which archives as knowledge institutions and archivists as knowledge workers have weathered such upheavals, adjusted to post-custodial strains, digital challenges, and post-modern stresses, only to come face-to-face with new “post-truth” anxieties.

Dr. Joan M. Schwartz is Professor and Head, Department of Art History and Art Conservation, Queen’s University, Kingston, where she teaches courses in the history of photography and nineteenth-century visual culture. She is also an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University, Ottawa. From 1977 to 2003, Dr. Schwartz was a specialist in Photography Acquisition and Research at the National Archives of Canada, Ottawa. An historical geographer and archival theorist, she has a dual scholarly focus on the power of both archives and photographs to shape notions of place and identity. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the Society of American Archivists.

Jorge Blasco Gallardo is a writer and independent researcher. His main interest and field of work is everything surrounding the verb “to archive”. He studied Fine Art at the University of Salamanca and broadened his training at the Technological Educational Institution of Athens. He took postgraduate and PhD studies at Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB-UPC). One of his best-known projects is Archive Cultures (2000 -2005), conducted in venues such as Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona; La Nau, Valencia; the University of Salamanca; and the Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de Prado, Valladolid. He curated the exhibition Urban Imaginaries in Latin America, by writer Armando Silva, in both the Barcelona and Bogotá editions.

His latest work is OCD: A Collection of One’s Own, for the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castile and Leon, a group project on obsessive-compulsive disorder in which he worked alongside psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to produce an unprecedented device for analysing the images of the disorder.

Next ARCHIVE. sessions: 8 June (Ramon Alberch and Eric Ketelaar) and 10 October (K.J. Rawson)