In the summer of 2024, I was invited to participate in the seminar Artists’ Archives: Tools for Research in Museums, led by art historians and curators Agar Ledo and Juan de Nieves. The seminar was organized by the Museum of Pontevedra, and took place on July 7, 2024.
The organizers described the seminar’s theme as follows: “The concept of the archive, along with that of the document, has expanded in recent decades amid the crisis of grand narratives, in parallel with processes of history-rewriting and the surge of alternative, divergent narratives. But shifting the relationship between artworks and documents also has an impact in the relationship between museums and their archives. The identification, acquisition, conservation, and dissemination of artists’ archives is a task within museums that brings to the fore topics which used to remain invisible in the past. Archives, in this sense, prove to be a highly effective device for raising new questions.”
During the various presentations, “archival” policies of Spain’s major art institutions were presented as case studies in order to examine the relationships between archives and museums—which are not always clear or evident.