Madrid, 2017

THE MACBA STUDY CENTER IS A PLACE WHERE THE ARCHIVE AND THE LIBRARY OF MACBA ARE LOCATED AND, SOMEHOW, MIXED AND SHARED WITH THE PUBLIC IN VARIOUS WAYS. TELL ME HOW IT STARTED, AND THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT OF THIS INITIATIVE.

I was still directing the Fundacío Tàpies: it was our intention to work politically and to engage with the city of Barcelona. For example, we did a project that was called Craigie Horsfield: The City of the People back in 1996—a time of general consensus when everybody was happy about the city and its decisions. We therefore wanted to create a space for negotiation where this scenario could be discussed with activists and collectives that did not quite fit into this image. In 1998-99 we were considering the anti-globalization demonstrations and had to deal with the way Barcelona looked after the Olympic games with the speculation, the real estate, and the tourism. We wanted to escape the idea of the museum as ornamentation for the city. We also wished to be critically engaged in thinking about agency and creating a space for intervention. At MACBA we organized the seminar “La acción directa como una de las Bellas Artes” [Direct Action as one of the Fine Arts], and out of it we conceived a series of workshops that became an “active” bridge between the institution and the city, to the point that workshop participants became very involved in the anti-globalization demonstration that took place in Barcelona on June 22-27, 2001. Later on, the agencies developed into working groups, some of which were organized by Paul B. Preciado on queer issues or studies related to the body; others were on economy, therapy, critical studies, etc. Between 2001 and 2006, we were fully involved in the process of conceiving the MACBA Study Center based on two areas from the same agency: the idea of radical education, and the archive that Mario Tronti talks about, that is, the archive of the ones who have no voice, not the archive telling the official History. In 2005 we decided to create a stable program, the PEI (Independent Studies Program). The idea was to initiate an autonomous structure, independent from the changes that very often affect museums, self-sustainable, and politically engaged. At least that was the original idea, for the global crisis came, and it is obvious that we did not succeed in bringing complete autonomy to the program.

THEN YOU LEFT MACBA…

Yes, a couple of years after the Study Center opened. But this shift in my professional path actually gave me the possibility to develop the project at Museo Reina Sofía. The crisis in 2008, the municipal government in 2011, and the Occupy movements brought many changes that affected the structure of the independent program as we developed it for MACBA. The background was also different: MACBA was and still is very rooted and related to the city of Barcelona; Museo Reina Sofía is a broader institution—it is a national museum. We still kept some elements of that idea but we had to transform it into something more global. We called it “Laboratorio de imaginacíon social” [Laboratory of Social Imagination], and now we call it “Instituto de Imaginación Radical” [Institute of Radical Imagination]. The idea is to imagine new forms of institutional organization and social critique of institutionality. The Institute of Radical Imagination is starting to self-organize with groups in Italy, Greece, Croatia, Spain, and Turkey. It is still developing, like a nomadic university, not wishing to be identified with an institution, and has to do with issues such as property, pedagogy, the role of the artist, the forms of activism, etc.

WHAT IS AN ARCHIVE TO YOU?

An archive is a memory, or it is the lack of memory. Archives should stay where they are born; therefore, we think it is more thoughtful to build a network and let them remain where they are. That is what happened with Red Conceptualismos del Sur, which is a collective initiative bringing together a set of researchers and artists from Latin America and Europe, founded in 2007 to reflect on the uses and politics of archives, and to work on the organization and constitution of some of the most important artists’ archives in South America.

Institutions are very fragile. Once you leave the institution your work can be lost very suddenly; therefore, we try to imagine other forms of organization, which are at the same time autonomous and sustainable, linked to us, but independent. We are also working on a network of archives with L’Internationale; it is ongoing.

AND THE “ARCHIVES OF THE COMMONS”?

In the “Archives of the Commons,” which is another initiative that we are supporting at Museo Reina Sofía, everything is accessible to everybody and there is not one way of cataloguing. The idea is to extend the Museo Reina Sofía’s paradigm of the “Museum of the Commons” and apply it to the organization and conservation of the countless types of archives, which proliferate in the social field, and are essential to organizing and making accessible the experience and historical perception of the present.

At Museo Reina Sofía, we are also developing the institutional archive. The traditional part concerns areas of predilection: the 1930s (Guernica, the authoritarian regime, discussions about the popular, the role of the artist, the civil war in Spain, exile, memory linked to history, etc.), or the 1960s-70s, because a lot of artists started to work with archives back then. We are developing this part of the archive in creative commons, and we try to digitize, to create a structure where the importance is not on the idea of property but sharing knowledge and questioning the rules of archiving. The second group of archives that we have are those produced by Museo Reina Sofía itself. These are organized according to rules that are not ours but those of the administration, but we can still push to make them totally available to everyone. We are working on creating a system that considers all the elements of archive-making within an institution, with all the voids and the silence that, for instance, oral communication implies. We come from a position of institutional critique but things have changed a lot since the 1960s-70s; we have to think of new systems.

IS YOUR OWN ARCHIVE—AND THOSE OF OTHER MUSEO REINA SOFÍA CURATORS’— FILED AND INTEGRATED INTO THE INSTITUTIONAL ARCHIVES?

Yes, they are. I am very poorly organized on this level and I do not have much time, but everything is on my computer and everybody can consult it, for it does not belong to me: it is owned by the administration and they take care of saving data that I produce as the director. The question is not to have the documents, but to understand the rules that inform them. As Derrida said, an archive is both the space where it—the archive—is kept, and the rules that govern it, which are not neutral at all by the way. How to introduce other behaviors into this system is the real challenge. How to change the machine is the real question: how to tell the story of the machine and its effectiveness, its silences, its rules.

INSTITUTIONAL ARCHIVES HAVE BEEN USED A LOT RECENTLY TO CELEBRATE THE INSTITUTION AND ITS HISTORY, WHAT IS YOUR POSITION ON THAT?

This use of the archive, the one that is intended to give glory to the institution, enlightens no one, indeed: it is the opposite. It brings shadows. It definitely seems the wrong way to go for me. Archives should be used to de-monumentalize the institution, not just to document or to celebrate its history, which is very problematic and very naive too: we cannot pretend that the documents will be able to unveil the truth, for they have their own complex logic and genealogies. That is why we contribute to the Red Conceptualismos del Sur or the Institute of Radical Imagination, to create hybrid institutions that question themselves every time, not to become a caricature of oneself… that is what happens often to those institutions that use the archive for self-celebration.

WHAT IS THE ARCHIVE OF THE FUTURE GOING TO LOOK LIKE IN YOUR OPINION?

I have no idea what an archive will be in the future, because history is a struggle. Some institutions’ way of archiving is about making sure works or documents do not lose value, and about property, but we know that the more you share the richer you are, so we would be better going in the other direction. I think that everything should be available to everybody; knowledge should be shared as much as possible, which is the idea of the “Archives of the Commons.”

DIGITIZATION SEEMS TO BE THE BIG ISSUE NOW IN INSTITUTIONAL ARCHIVES, AS IF IT IS ENOUGH TO OPEN AN ARCHIVE TO THE PUBLIC, TO MAKE IT NAVIGABLE OR TO RAISE ARCHIVAL AWARENESS.

It is much more complex than that, of course. We need to create a structure, not only digitize—a program that would allow us to change the law. Copyright companies did not care about the archive in the past, but now it appears they are making a big deal of it. It is an important fight, which is going to get bigger in the future. To have documents available is the key. Also, there is no memory of the in-between, and we should find new ways of capturing and distributing it. We keep making exhibitions and they basically disappear like ephemeral buildings that lasted a few weeks during Louis XIV’s time. We do not have the tools for keeping this memory; it cannot be in a traditional archive.

DO YOU HAVE A PERSONAL ARCHIVE?

Even if I have been dealing a lot with archives throughout my career, I do not have a personal archive of my own professional activities. I do not file anything, not even family photos, but I wish I did. I am not a good archivist; I have lost many things when moving from one place to another. I have left the archives produced as director at the institutions where I have worked; I have kept nothing that is not strictly personal. I think we are living in a historical period which is similar to the fourteenth century, prior to the discovery of America, with the Protestant wars spreading everywhere in Europe. At that time, it was clear that things were changing radically, such as the role of the artist and of the intellectual in general. It was the beginning of modern times. The way we think of memory and archives has a lot to do with the written but very often we are concerned with the non-recorded. We are in the process of changing and will have to learn how to deal with the archiving of what is not written. We tell stories differently: the role of the intellectual is changing again. The tools that we are using are not our tools anymore. The future will have little to do with what we are currently thinking and how we are thinking it.