Paris, 2015

Lorenzo Benedetti is the curator of contemporary art at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2017-). Previously, he was the director of De Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2014-16), and of De Vleeshal Art Centre, Middelburg, the Netherlands (2008-14). Benedetti curated the Dutch Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), and in 2005 founded the Sound Art Museum, Rome. He was the director of Fondazione Volume! in Rome, and curator of the Marta Herford Museum for Art, Architecture and Design, Herford, Germany. He has been guest curator at the Kunsthalle in Mulhouse, France, and professor at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht.

LET’S TALK ABOUT REACTIVATING EXHIBITIONS AND ARCHIVES.

It is difficult to reactivate something that belongs to a different historical context—unlike cultural tendencies, which reappear. In my opinion, we can only talk about reactivating an exhibition if the works from the original show are displayed again, and probably, even in the same place. The number of works involved defines the degree of reactivation. Therefore, reactivating an exhibition means to experience the difference between how a show was made the first time and how it is made now. We need to consider this temporal distance when we observe the production parameters. Another interesting thing to consider is that we are involved in archival workmanship: there is a recovery of historical material, and a new presentation. Moreover, reactivating guarantees the possibility of celebrating the original exhibition, and it has a defined margin of success. A remade exhibition has a historical value that changes the initial value of the exhibition. The remake becomes, more often than not, something fake. Either you position the historical parameter which you want to recreate as close to the original as possible, or you reinterpret the subject—the same theme, but readapted for the current generation. Whatever the historical background, associating the contemporary with another contemporary, that is no longer the original contemporary, becomes useless. Historically, there is a paradox, an ambiguity. In any case, it is inevitable that the origins of the exhibition will be distorted by reactivating it.

CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI SAID THAT THE ARCHIVE IS DESTROYED BY STORING TOO MUCH. HAVE YOU PARTICIPATED IN REACTIVATIONS THAT INVOLVE ONE OR SEVERAL ARCHIVES?

I participated in the re-edition of Seth Siegelaub’s book, the Xerox Book, as part of the exhibition Seth Siegelaub–Beyond Conceptual Art in December 2015, at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. The interest in remaking his book, as part of the exhibition, is so that it can be redistributed. The book has been reactivated, in fact, because it has been remade in an identical way, 1:1, with the same kind of paper, and is available to purchase at a moderate price. This seems to me to be a remake that is very close to the original. Actually, we have only recently started to pay attention to archives. For a long time, institutions preferred to get rid of them, and a lot of the information available on historical exhibitions was lost. Through the documentation we can actually go back to the way in which the work was installed, and the protocols that were used at other times in the history of exhibitions. Exhibitions are always a means of investigation for the history of art, because when you make an exhibition, you create contexts.

WHAT KIND OF AN ARCHIVIST ARE YOU?

Most of the exhibitions I have curated were for institutions, so the documentation did not stay with me. I have to say that I do not believe that an exhibition is something closed, with a beginning and an end. An exhibition is not a single project; it is always connected with other shows I have organized, and others that are not mine. An exhibition opens up like a rhizome. Between thinking about the show and making it happen, there are many moments that communicate with other ideas and situations. The archive of the things I do is made up of the documentation of these moments related to artists, themes, places, or contexts. As far as I’m concerned, research is always porous. The past is reopened to us with new perspectives. This is a Warburgian idea that I completely agree with. To me, an archive is not a closed collection, because I use it to recreate other things. The internet has revolutionized the way we document and remember; emails are now a big part of archives. But the material is more fragile, and in the future there will be a big problem related to amnesia.

PERHAPS THAT IS WHY THERE IS SUCH AN INTEREST IN ARCHIVES NOWADAYS.

In my opinion, archives are not just a current obsession. The idea of an archive changed in the 1990s, with the arrival of the internet. At present, archives occupy an important space in conceptual practices. In the beginning, the internet was a great novelty because it enabled the exchange of all kinds of information. Nowadays, the amount of data is excessive, so there is an interest in archives of a different kind, a different nature. In the future, a lack of storage will reduce the amount of digital information available. This doesn’t mean that paper was more secure, because as we have seen, it was not stored; it was disposed of because it occupied too much space. Here at least digital has an advantage: it does not take up too much physical space.

WOULD YOU SAY THAT YOU ARE INTERESTED IN THE DISCUSSIONS RELATED TO ARCHIVES?

Archives do not concern me from a historical point of view but as a way to understand our relationship with form, and the dynamics that appear with them at certain moments. I have an interest in earlier curators who at different times and contexts have experimented with the exhibition format: from Alfred Barr and Alexander Dorner to Harald Szeemann. I am definitely interested in the origin of things.