Curatorial Archives in Curatorial Practices is an ongoing project initiated by Michela Alessandrini in 2015, aiming to emphasize the relevance of curators’ archives in shaping curatorial discourse and building exhibitions’ history. CACP reflects on curatorial archives, both personal and institutional, and their role in exhibition making, from conception to display. The project attempts to present curatorial archives as tools to manifest visions, in the case of personal curatorial archives; or as platforms where societal, political and cultural narratives are done and undone, in the case of institutional curatorial archives. Particularly focused on illustrating the multiplicity of curators’ approaches to their archives, CACP seeks to analyze the dynamics underlying the creation and conservation of an archive; and investigate the increasing interest for curatorial archives to understand its origins and purposes. CACP suggests that archives have to be considered not only as a site for objective research, as “fact providers”, but also as a place where practice is expressed and takes shape. A salon where it’s possible to enter in discussion with individual and collective methodologies, an operational structure where curatorial visions only appear following a direct confrontation with the whole as a system.

Based on first-hand material, CACP is intended as a series of ongoing interviews to international curators about their own archives and their approach towards archives they produce and work with at an institutional level. The author starts most of the interviews by asking to the curators their own definition of archive, gathering a multiplicity of (often contradicting) answers that threaten the notion of archive – at least, the immutable one, generally recognized in Western cultures, opening up to different methodologies and purposes of archiving and displaying.

The first volume of interviews was published in 2018 by SALT, Istanbul, and presented content gathered from 2015 to 2018:

Ferran Barenblit, Manuel Borja-Villel, Charles Esche, Vincenzo de Bellis, Vasıf Kortun, Abdellah Karroum, Chiara Bertola, Giovanni Carmine, Massimiliano Gioni, Hou Hanru, Cornelia Lauf, Jean-Hubert Martin, Viktor Misiano, Pietro Rigolo, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lorenzo Benedetti, Susan Hapgood, Francesco Manacorda, Barbara Vanderlinden.

The second cycle of interviews is shared for the first time on this platform, and includes content gathered from 2019 to 2024, notably interviews to:

Raqs Media Collective, Ping Lin, Hadeel Eltayeb and Locale, Nada Shabout, Suheyla Takesh, Christine Tohmé, Ala Younis, Sol Henaro, Yuko Hasegawa, Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, Christine Khouri and Rasha Salti, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Natasha Gingwala, John Tain.

The second cycle develops the research considering a larger geographical context, featuring contributions by curators operating in Palestine, Mexico, Japan, Lebanon, China, Iran, UAE, India, Taiwan, Sudan, and Iraq. The interviews were realized between 2019 and 2021 and, although many of the interviewees are not speaking from the same (institutional) role they were in when their conversations with the author took place, their contribution seems more actual and relevant than ever.

Alessandrini assumes that expanding the notion of archives starts from expanding the geographical, cultural, and socio-political context from which we look at it – for one obviously does not archive in the same way depending on the circumstances in which he/she does it. In fact, archiving can be an intimate gesture, or a selfish act of self-conservation; in other, opposite cases, it serves a collective purpose, working as a kind of resistance but also operating an inherent violence. Oblivion, as well, does not mean the same in a society where we are under the illusion of remembering everything; and in one in which archives are destroyed daily, in order to cancel memory and prevent political agency.