An archival impulse (exercise)

In 2004, US art historian Hal Foster wrote an influential text “An Archival Impulse” that mapped the rise of archive-based practices in international contemporary art, some of which can be traced to historical precedents by artists of the early 20th century. The archive, whether personal, institutional, official or unofficial, is an always partial repository or collection of data or information that requires access, selection, and interpretation. Since the late 20th and early 21st centuries, artists have developed “archival art” into a distinctive aesthetic category, frequently displayed using digital or analogue archival modes and methods. Artists use archives to reveal and to tell stories, not all of which are true, or need to be true.

Foster identifies the following shared traits amongst archival artists:

1. Archival artists “share a notion of artistic practice as an idiosyncratic probing into particular features, objects and events in modern art, philosophy, and history”.
2. Archival artists “seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present.”
3. Archival artists “elaborate on the found image, object and text, and favor the installation format.”
4. Archival artists bring to light obscure sources, forgotten, overlooked, or deliberately censored sources.
5. Archival artists propose counter-histories and counter-memories.
6. Archival artists draw on and produce archives. They turn the archive as an “excavation site,” into a “construction site.”
7. Archival art “underscores the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private”.
8. Archival artists work with collections of data, objects, documents, create laboratories, storage spaces, studios.
9. Archival art seeks to connect what things that may ordinarily not be connected, or whose connections might go unnoticed.


In short, archival artists use archival forms, materials, and modes of presentation in their practices. They work with traces: collections of data, objects, images, records, and documents that offer information to be read, interpreted and experienced by those who encounter the archive. According to French philosopher Michel Foucault, archives regulate what can and cannot, what will and will not, be said.

Using your knowledge and intuition about archives, as well as your own digital and analogue sources and skills, please consider how you might use the archive as a source for a creative practice by building an archive or a fragment of an archive you will share with us through documentation. This archive can relate to a life, a personal memory, or memories of your kin, it can relate to an event in the near present or in the past, it can be devoted to your favorite television series, or musician, fashion trend, or twitter feed. You can make an archive of the outfits you wear for the next week or all the poems you’ve read over the past year. The size, scope, and display of the archive is entirely up to you. Please display, photograph, film, or describe your archive for us (text or audio or audio-visual) and post this trace of your archive on hotglue.me.

Some examples of archival art practices:

You can visit Aimee Zito Lema’s current exhibition at Wilfried Lentz gallery in Rotterdam: https://wilfriedlentz.com/exhibitions/aimee-zito-lema-film-stills-from-214322/

Akram Zaatari’s “On Photography People and Modern Times,” Akram Zaatari is an artist and founder of the “Arab Image Foundation,” the offices of which were damaged during the August 4 explosion in Beirut. https://vimeo.com/19680810

Tacita Dean’s “Save Film” project http://www.savefilm.org/news/tacita-dean-on-film/

Michael Rakowitz’s “The Invisible Enemy Should not Exist” project (ongoing since 2007) http://www.michaelrakowitz.com/the-invisible-enemy-should-not-exist

Lorna Simpson’s “Unanswerable” https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/6238-lorna-simpson-unanswerable
and
https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/39242/1/how-artist-lorna-simpson-makes-new-meaning-from-old-materials

There are many more, and there are some textual sources in the dropbox if you’d like to consult them.

Laila

I have always loved films and series growing up, now that I am an audiovisual student that admiration has of course grown massively. Since a few years I have two apps on my phone that are my holy grails. With my fascination for the 7th art growing I had to have something to write down and "collect" the pieces I have watched.
The first app that I use is cinematic where I list all the film I have seen and the ones I still want to see. The second app (my favourite) is TVtime where I check and add all the series I have (binge)watched and the ones I still have to devour. The best thing with this last one is that every time I check off one episode it automatically calculates how many hours, weeks, months you have spent watching series. It might seem bad but in a way to me it brings me a lot of satisfaction, it's like a to do list where you feel like you have to cross of everything. It might seem like a lot but I'll say that it's for educational purposes ;)