Brussels, 2015

Barbara Vanderlinden is an independent curator and the founding director of Roomade, Brussels. She has co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Manifesta 2 (Luxembourg, 1998), Laboratorium (Antwerp, 1999), Revolution/Restoration (Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 2004), and the 2004 Taipei Biennial, Do You Believe in Reality? (Taipei Fine Arts Museum). She has served as professor of Exhibition Studies and director of the Exhibition Laboratory at the University of the Arts Helsinki, where she organized Laboratory of Hearing. Previously, she was a visiting professor and the initiator of the International Curatorial Programme 2001 at the Gwangju Biennale Foundation; associate professor of curatorial studies for the CCS Bard Master of Arts program in Curatorial Studies, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; and professor of Exhibition and Museum Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute (2005–2007).

WHAT DOES THE TERM “CURATORIAL ARCHIVE” MEAN TO YOU?

We could say that there is a distinction between curators’ archives and those created by museum institutions that give us access to the memory and archives of preceding generations. I would like to think of the archive of the curator as a construct, a work created in the mind. In other words, the curator influences the record of creation; theirs are in some respect archives ex-ante, archives that document the present time and the near future. Whether or not the information or materials you decide to collect as reminders, and how you organize them is, in fact, a suggestion of what should be considered for future research and information that will affect the next generations. Such archives are in fact a Gesamtkunstwerk, that is, they include all the necessary ingredients to create a memory to allow a future generation to feed upon, allowing those future generations to add to them. What you select or collect or what you exclude from the archive is part of the creation of this Gesamtkunstwerk, so it is an open form of creation whereby the present and the future co- create. The distinction between the institutional and the curator’s archive is one that focuses on the question of the authorship of this creation. The legal dimension of this is interesting because such ex-ante curatorial archives are, in fact, a co-creation whereby there is a co-authorship between the past, present, and the future. It combines an assessment from a previous perspective by eliminating and adding information and materials that could not have been known at an earlier date, with something selected or organized (designed) in advance or in anticipation of a future perspective. To me, the curatorial archive is very much creation in the flow between these authorships. This is something that I would like to stress about the curatorial archive: it is a co-creation between different authors across past, present and future, and like all forms of creation, it is authorship that should be copyrighted.

CAN AN ARCHIVE BE CONSIDERED AN AUTHENTIC WORK?

I think so; a curatorial archive is a form of composition, very much like an exhibition, and that is an authentic and original work. The way you select, order, and connect the material and information contained in the archive, how you create a structure or database for this information is a personal statement. An example is a long-term archive project that I started in 1995 about A 37 90 89, the short-lived art and communication institute that appeared in 1969 in Antwerp. In 1995 I started to archive the information and material about this project in what was called An Agenda of A. The intension was to collect and archive the material and to activate it for the sake of future ideas. A 37 90 89 inspired me to create the institute Roomade which I founded and ran for ten years: it was my way of reading history and thinking about the future. So the A 37 90 89 archive was about creating a flow of ideas across half a century. It enabled me to think of the past and to project a future. In that sense, nothing is truly unique. All of what we do is in some way inspired by past and previous events, which, in turn, generates new ideas. In my opinion, the archive is crucial in that process, it is a way of creating a relationship with history. Through the process of archiving, and its capacity of connecting past, present and future, one can trace the long durée of art’s development and articulate the gradual accumulations and transformation of ideas. This is what I am interested in when thin- king of the archive: it is a driving force in history and deals with the expression, preservation, and change of human ideas over time. For example, through his archive, Harald Szeemann’s ideas continue, but it is also his archive that sustains the creation of new ideas about his work. I have always been interested in the archive’s active role in knowledge production, because knowledge cannot technically belong to any specific time: it is a process between different combinations of time. In that sense, it is interesting to see the archive as central to our practice as a place and process from where to generate new ideas. I keep materials and information with one intention: to reactivate them. There is always an idea or story to pick up and continue in the archive. I keep it to imagine new stories. It is an idea of the archive that totally involves authentic creation.

DOES ARCHIVING HAVE A FINAL AESTHETIC RELATIONSHIP TO THE EXHIBITION ITSELF?

This is an interesting question in relation to curators’ archives. Many curators have been fueling the discussion about the archive in the work of artists, and the archive as artistic work today. Naturally, most of the artists’ ephemeral works are experienced live, and only the archive can ensure their enduring life. Here the archives play a constitutive role, not merely as documentation, but also as autonomous works of art. They are source material about the ephemeral work, but also attest to the complex ways in which archives, and especially the images in them, have the ability to both freeze and extend an aesthetic experience in time. Similarly, one could argue that the curators’ archives also push against the grain of documentation to constitute both a picture and a concrete body of documents and images that can be appreciated in the absence of an exhibition. In that sense, archives about previous exhibitions also concern the relationship between perception and information. So we could indeed speak of the “aesthetics” of the curatorial archive, something that is information but can also be experienced sensually in an exhibition.