Liverpool, 2016

WHAT RELATIONSHIP DO YOU HAVE WITH YOUR ARCHIVE?

I’m a little anarchic in the arrangement of my personal archive, in the sense that I don’t follow a precise methodology. On the other hand, I have had to leave the documentation with the last three institutions in which I have worked, so all the correspondence I had during those periods is no longer with me. There are different ways in which an institution can archive this material. Tate Liverpool keeps the correspondence from the last six months available for the curators, while earlier material ends up in the global archive.

I have accumulated a lot of things, especially in relation to the digital part. There’s always less written material. What does it mean to keep documents today, when in fact everything is documented? The internet is an archive. It is also a great danger because we don’t know how long it will last. We are in a very strange moment now, the rules are changing and we don’t know what will come out of this movement.

As for me, I keep all my notebooks where I write every day. They’re not organized, but I know that I have them, and I don’t feel like throwing them away because they are mnemonic traces that I might need to go back to one day. I also have the material that artists send me, books and catalogs, but not even these are in order. Concerning letters and paper documentation, I only have contracts and bureaucratic documents. I reread texts often, because I may have to further develop them, or give public presentations on certain past projects. This is a part of the archive that I use more than the one related to exhibitions. I wouldn’t want to reactivate a project that is finished for me. I review the shows that I haven’t yet organized, those that remain as a project, more so than the shows that I have already done. I see in them aspects that I can develop in a different context.

WHAT DO YOU IMAGINE YOUR ARCHIVE WILL BE LIKE IN THE FUTURE?

The main guideline I would like to use to organize my archive is to group together images and texts. Texts would be private and public, because you should have access to the curator’s private documentation if you wish to retrace his/her intentions. Therefore, the installation views, all the material gathered in the catalog, and all the texts that visitors have in order to immerse them-selves in the show, for example the audio guide. In short, the entire structure of the exhibition and its presentation to the public.

IN WHAT WAY DO YOU THINK AN ARCHIVE CAN BE OPENED UP?

That’s very hard to answer, because, in fact, an archive is a sort of potential discourse. It’s practically impossible to open up an archive; it’s like exposing all the expressions of a multidimensional situation in one room. From the “curatorial grammar” point of view, it’s always very complex because you select only an infinitesimal part of the total potential of an entire archive, unless it’s exhibitions such as “If You Lived Here Still… (2009) and If You Lived Here… (1989) by Martha Rosler, or Interarchive: Archival Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Art Field (2002) from Hans Ulrich Obrist’s archive. However, even when an archive is shown as an accumulation of documents, its potential is not fully revealed. You cannot show all the possible worlds, the parallel universes that it makes reference to in one single space. One example that I really liked was the one shown in Ennesima, an exhibition curated by Vincenzo de Bellis at the Triennale di Milano in 2015. The way in which he created and exhibited the archive of the Via Lazzaro Palazzi Group, in my opinion, worked rather well, because the data was made accessible on paper and in digital format. Additionally, a timeline that told the group’s story was linked with another that explained what was happening at the same time in the national and international art world during those years. That has been the most convincing attempt to exhibit an archive that I have seen recently. De Bellis was able to create a hypertext that guarantees access to an archive in its entirety and at any moment.

WHAT IS YOUR DEFINITION OF AN ARCHIVE?

An archive is any potential vocabulary, any accumulation of sentences, or possibility of enunciation. There is an almost linguistic aspect in the arranging of materials, of knowledge: a composition of words, in space-related forms for an exhibition, and time-related for a discourse. To me, a museum’s collection is an archive.

IT SEEMS TO ME THAT ARCHIVE AND COLLECTION ARE TWO CONCEPTS THAT ARE MOVING CLOSER TOGETHER.

Indeed! And you can see it in the way some institutions work, like the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Tate Gallery itself, whose collection and archive are available online, on the same database, both equipped with the same information tools. This is something that was not possible not so long ago; it’s a very recent evolution that is related to a broader idea of a collection. From the point of view of cultural hierarchy, but also from an economic viewpoint, archive and collection have never been so close, and in the future they will be even more so.

WHY DO YOU THINK THIS IS HAPPENING NOW?

Because there is an increasingly important movement, in my opinion also initiated by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in which art is becoming less disconnected from the social sphere. Art is becoming less centralized. However, it is essential to tell the importance of certain objects through the relationship that these interweave with other categories of objects.

A MORE COLLECTIVE RELATIONSHIP, A NETWORK OF REFERENCES… IS IT POSSIBLE THAT IN A WORLD WHERE EVERYTHING IS DIGITAL, FLUID, IMMATERIAL, WE ARE DEVELOPING A FETISHISM FOR THE OBJECT AND THE DOCUMENT?

Of course! And also because of sympathetic magic, that is, if a person has touched a certain object, it acquires its own properties. This is the reason why we might want to buy a dress that was worn by Madonna or a piano played by Elton John. This happens as a result of the digital era, but also of the democratization of access to the museums’ archives and collections, which is related to the tradition of Le Musée imaginaire by Malraux. Photography was used by Malraux to put different cultures on the same level.

BEYOND THE FACT THAT A DOCUMENT WRITTEN BY HARALD SZEEMANN CAN BE “SEXIER” THAN A DIGITAL TRANSCRIPTION, IN YOUR OPINION, WHAT REMAINS OF CURATORS IN THE DOCUMENTS THEY LEAVE BEHIND? WHAT CAN WE DISCOVER ABOUT THE CURATOR BY STUDYING HIS/HER ARCHIVE?

The creative process and the relationship they establish with artists. A methodology that is possible to understand, even if only partially, from the exchange of letters; whether it be by post, fax, or email. Alternatively, all the conversations we have should be recorded, but you would need a maniacal attitude towards the archive to achieve it. If everybody behaved like this, the archiving process would be completely insane.

THIS ALSO IMPLIES A RECONSIDERATION OF THE TEMPORALITY RELATED TO THE ARCHIVE. HANS ULRICH OBRIST SAYS THAT THERE SHOULD BE INSTITUTIONS THAT INSTANTANEOUSLY DEAL WITH ARCHIVES WHILE THEY ARE STILL GROWING. THERE IS A FEAR THAT ALL THE INFORMATION THAT EXISTS WHILE THE OWNER IS ALIVE, WILL DISAPPEAR WITH HIM OR HER FOREVER AFTER DEATH. PERHAPS ARCHIVES SHOULD ALSO BE REVIEWED FROM A SPATIAL POINT OF VIEW. STEFANO BOERI SUGGESTED ME THAT THE ARCHIVE OF THE FUTURE WILL BE A MONUMENT.

The introduction to L’Archéologie du Savoir [The Archaeology of Knowledge] by Michel Foucault, says that the duty of the archive is to transform documents into monuments. The archive trans- forms the recording of a historical fact into the mnemonic instrument that helps a civilization find a narrative for its past. This is the monument. From a semantic point of view, the monument is a work of art, at least in a western society. It can celebrate a historic event or be a cultural trace that has been preserved from a past civilization. A monument is like a Stargate that opens doors to parallel universes, different potential enunciations. In a similar way, archives contribute to preserve the importance of a historical fact for a community. Is it the same situation for the archives we are producing today? I don’t know. What is the drive that could make someone look at the archive of a curator, a scientist, or an artist?

PERHAPS IF WE COULD TAKE CARE OF IT FROM THE BEGINNING, AN ARCHIVE WOULD NO LONGER BE A COLLECTION OF DATA THAT OPENS UP PERSPECTIVES ABOUT THE PAST, BUT AN INSTRUMENT CAPABLE OF OFFERING US A GLIMPSE OF THE PRESENT IN DEVELOPMENT. THE ARCHIVE WOULD CRYSTALLIZE LIVING DATA OR INFORMATION FROM THE RECENT PAST. AND MAYBE IT WOULD BE ALIVE!

This is what happens in institutions. It doesn’t happen with collections or monographic archives, but it looks like it’s moving in this direction. We seek to register the present, which, in my opinion, is to register the future too, because the way in which we will understand the objects that go into an archive now has not yet been formulated.

IT IS A SPASM, MAKING EVERYTHING ACCESSIBLE AND IMMEDIATE. WE TRY TO UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED ONLY SECONDS AGO, BEFORE IT SLIPS AWAY.