Ceglie Messapica, 2016

WHAT RELATIONSHIP DO YOU HAVE WITH YOUR ARCHIVE? HOW IS IT CONSTITUTED? WHAT KIND OF ARCHIVE IS IT?

“Tell me what kind of archive you have, and I will tell you what kind of curator you are.” I try to see curators as pre or post-professional entities; that is to say, their relationship with the artist should be, in my opinion, more than professional. On the contrary, it’s a human relationship, a friendship. Therefore, I don’t have a large archive of the artists I have worked with. When I plan an exhibition, I prefer to see the locations, contact my friends, browse through the catalogs of my colleagues. I don’t have an archive like Harald Szeemann and Kasper Koenig had. I remember that Koenig’s office at Portikus was full of files, and that every box was labeled with the name of an artist. Looking at the walls of his studio provided a panoramic view of European artistic life in the last three decades…

Instead, the way I work does not assume the existence of an objective archive. To me, the personal memory of the encounter with the artist is no less important than his or her portfolio. I’m not very interested in collecting material. I only keep what is essential: a few catalogs of major shows that are treasured as a fetish or souvenir of personal experience. The rest, I donate to libraries. Having all the documentation about an artist and their development becomes important if I have to organize survey or retrospective exhibitions. In that case, I obtain the material; otherwise, in general, I can do without.

My archive is very private and intimate; it’s my personal memory. I would say that my archive is, above all, existential. My exhibitions are documented in a methodical way in order to protect the copies of the catalogs, especially if there are only a few left. I have a very dialogic, reflective rapport with the exhibitions that I have organized, and with the corresponding material. This allows me to interpret the meanings that emerge after a certain time. What I do now seems to me like a break from what I did before, even if I realize that I sometimes quote myself. These paradoxes appear when you reflect on your past, on the matrix that is revealed throughout your career. Your inner structure, your curatorial spirit, the internal logic of your work, which predetermines your process without you being aware of it; all of this is visible, in retrospect, if you look at your personal archive. Looking at an archive reveals preannounced confirmations.

DO YOU HAPPEN TO MAKE EXHIBITIONS BASED ON THE ONES YOU HAVE ORGANIZED IN THE PAST?

Sure, although unconsciously. I have noticed that there are two important aspects to my work: the first one is the experimentation between art and society, which generates projects where art is a lived experience. The second one is the plaisir du texte [pleasure in text], the plaisir de l’image [pleasure in image], that comes from my academic education in art history, my fascination for the autonomy of art and images as a value in itself; sensual, imaginative, objective. I’m a curator who oscillates between a sociological and conservative approach. I recently happened to invite an artist to develop a work that had already been done for one of my exhibitions in 2001. In this case, I quoted myself. Even if context and subject matter are very different, the work that the artist made fourteen years ago is still appropriate; it has a new value in the conceptual drama, but not in the visual one. We always take something from the past when we formulate the present.

WHAT IS THE TEMPORAL DIMENSION OF THE ARCHIVE?

I believe that the drama experienced by the curator is similar to that of the theater director or music performer: we are destined to disappear. Unfortunately, what we do cannot be reproduced. The exhibition is an ephemeral medium, bound for oblivion. Of course, there are videos and pictures, but how can you see a work by Luca Ronconi or Peter Brook on television? The archival document is a trace that does not replace the experience, in the precise moment, in the precise room, in the precise conditions. In an exhibition, everything is very contextualized. For this reason, I don’t be- lieve much in the power of the archive to create a memory. I realize it is important to preserve these traces to testify and facilitate the researcher’s work, but above all I feel that the archive is important for myself. Moreover, if I’m presenting the material it contains, I can give a complete testimony; it is by far the most authentic way to revisit the archive. When, instead, one of my historical exhibitions is studied and taken up again by other people, it ac- tivates a mechanism of de-contextualization that is impossible to control. At this point, the archive belongs to someone else. Quite often, the material is exploited, and not reviewed in a critical way, but just appropriated… and this is regrettable. My archive belongs to the archives of other people.

DOES THIS CONCERN YOU?

It is not that it worries me; rather, it suggests a certain skepticism towards the obsession with archives. There are a few curators that collect every- thing to a tee; they are obsessed with preserving everything. I have realized that a complete archive is utopic. Behind this archival effort I see personal ambition, the desire for eternity, to outlive time itself, prolong your own existence. I believe that the archive, rather than being an extension of our own existence, from the moment it is opened, constitutes the existence of other people.

THIS DESIRE TO SURVIVE DEATH, TO LEAVE TRACES OF OUR EXISTENCE IN ORDER TO CONTINUE LIVING IN SOMEONE ELSE’S MEMORY, IS PART OF HUMAN NATURE…

Absolutely! But if we have done great things, these remain the same… no matter in what form. You are not the only one that collects your own traces; these exist independently from you—In people’s memory, in the archives of the institutions where you have worked, in researchers’ theses, in the memory of your contemporaries. Obviously you can’t be indifferent to this issue, but personally, I try to keep what I like to preserve and what will be useful for my work, not what will be useful to a future archivist.

WHAT DO YOU THINK WILL HAPPEN TO YOUR ARCHIVE?

Having lived through the 1990s, the social chaos of the post-communist and post-Soviet transitional period, I saw how state and institutional archives were destroyed. The pain of seeing how historical memory was debased has been a trauma, the realization of barbarism. Because of this, I have kept a lot of things, documents that are not about my projects: letters, testimonies, and photographs. This was a moral and cultural obligation. I knew that if I hadn’t taken care of them myself, many things would have disappeared. In the 1990s, I collected invitations to exhibitions because I realized that all the initiatives that were emerging at that time were very fragile, and they would not have been able to preserve their own memory. The context pushed me in this direction. I had this instinct because the archive was at risk. I have recently given away this collection to the archive of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, and the NCCA in Moscow. In normal times, we shouldn’t be aware of the archive; it should be part of the everyday life of a society. We shouldn’t worry about archives. If we do, it means we’re in a moment of crisis and social breakdown—an exceptional moment. Or when we go through a personal crisis we have a specific concern for our own history; it’s a sort of narcissism, exaggerated ambition, or neurosis. When our energy is focused on archiving rather than taking action, it means we have a problem.

WHAT IS YOUR POSITION REGARDING THE REACTIVATION OF PAST EXHIBITIONS?

I think it’s a worthwhile experience. Society does not move forward through original discoveries, but through the reinterpretation of past experiences, and those that are forgotten and in the archives. In Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time], one of the characters surprises his friends with beautiful hats. They ask him: “But where do you find all the- se beautiful hats?” And he answers: “I do not find them, I keep them.” The idea of the new is something that has already existed in the past, but it has been forgotten and thus constitutes the present’s foundation. Exhibitions that reenact the past reflect this logic, and it’s extremely important that they exist. When you bring out the past, it makes sense if you create something new; otherwise it’s only a copy. If you only have the desire to relive the past, this effort will not be successful. On the contrary, there is a risk of exposing fetishes, corpses.

The exhibition is unrepeatable; it must renew itself, create a dialogic relationship with the present, be anchored to the current atmosphere. It must create a new experience. To take something back from your personal archive or from others’, and to propose something again, emulating the original exhibition, is equivalent to giving a very simplistic interpretation of the concept of reenactment.

WHERE IS YOUR ARCHIVE LOCATED?

On the computer! I try to digitize everything that I can use for my work. Otherwise, it is at the office in Moscow or in my home in Puglia. I am well-organized. I take care of it—although less and less, as time goes by. At the beginning of my career, when I was an independent curator, I was even more systematic, out of necessity and for fear that those things would get lost. Now the idea of the archive has entered ordinary professional life. This doesn’t trouble me. Having said that, I believe the archive is always with us, that it never leaves us. Everybody is his or her own archive.