Archive
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 … Continued
At La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, the event After the Archive: Artwork and Document featured a roundtable discussion titled “Research / Musealization / Market Value,” during which I moderated a conversation between Brazilian collector Pedro Barbosa, art historian Manuel Borja-Villel, and Madrid-based art historian and gallery owner José de la Mano.
The Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya and the Museu Picasso in Barcelona organized an international symposium on archival practice in 21st-century art, bringing together archivists, curators, artists, historians, and researchers from the local and international art scenes. The symposium took place over two days and focused on two essential, overlapping actions: the task of ARCHIVING, … Continued
“Today, documenta’s independence from the art market is a given – at least, on the formal level, but this has not always been the case. There was a time when documenta was at the centre of a web of vested interests as diverse as the need for funding, the desire to democratize art, and the … Continued
“…Based on these reflections, the need was seen to give physical form to a hybrid, dynamic and social space, whose layout was sufficiently flexible to allow the development of certain functions of other spaces without being limited only to one: a classroom / a lounge / a projection room / an assembly room / an … Continued
On May 2, 2022, Museu Nacional de Catalunya (MNAC) hosted a conference dedicated to the photographic collection known as the “Iconographic Repertory [of Art] of Spain.” The purpose was to highlight the significance of this gigantic documentary collection, a large portion of which has been held at MNAC since 1970. The creation of the Repertorio … Continued
“…The documentary collection Queer Archive? (…) set out to map and document the struggles of gender activist communities in Madrid in the 1990s so as to prevent contagion and promote safe sex, especially given the dramatic lack of institutional policies tackling the health crisis. Researchers and activists Sejo Carrascosa, Lucas Platero, Andrés Senra and Fefa … Continued
UNESCO defines “research” as “creative and systematic work aimed at expanding the body of knowledge—including knowledge about humanity, culture, and society—and at developing new applications based on existing knowledge.” When we speak of research in general, we usually mean “scientific” research, which in fact encompasses a very heterogeneous spectrum of working models and methods. In … Continued
The artist’s book Aparicions / Apariciones is part of the exhibition project Coses que pasen, in which the artist Enric Farrés Durán uses the institutional archive of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) as a primary source of materials and inspiration. For the preparation of this project, as with other people who had been … Continued
In 2020, the international conference Artists, Archives and Networks, held in Budapest (Hungary) commemorated the 40th anniversary of the foundation of Artpool, which had come into being as an independent archive, but had become, by then, an organization named Arpool Art Research Center and connected to the university. The conference aimed to map the cultural-political-historical … Continued
A very brief text on the current position of archives in museum institutions, which appeared in the publication Sich mit Sammlungen anlegen. Gemeinsame Dinge und alternative Archiven (Berlin: Verlag De Gruyter, 2020), edited by Martina Griesser, Nora Sternfeld, and Luisa Ziaja.
This book brings together the lectures presented during the second edition of seminar Archive of the Commons II, which was co-organized by Foundation of the Commons, Museo Reina Sofía Museum and Southern Conceptualisms Network, and took place in Madrid in 2017. The seminar set off to review the role of the archive in contemporary culture, its metaphorical potential and also its possible use as a tool for knowledge and critical practice.
«…Debido a su papel como directora del Archivo, de hecho, Ela Spornitz aparece mencionada en la web institucional, donde la lista de directores se acompaña de sus fotografías. Así pues, para ilustrar estas cartas en la conferencia que estaba preparando, solicité al Archivo su fotografía. El documento digital que recibí me brindó otra sugerente e inesperada sorpresa…»
1980 signalled an important moment of change at multiple levels. Politically, Western societies undertook a deep conservative turn, while market philosophy spread relentlessly to all walks of life, including culture and art, rapidly affected likewise by the “logic of late capitalism” enunciated by Jameson. In the arts, a number of phenomena coexisted during this decade. … Continued
The 5th International Symposium on Artist Books, organized by the artist publications fair Arts Libris (Barcelona, 2018) and moderated by art historian and curator Glòria Picazo, focused on artist’s books collecting. Participants in the sessions included João Fernandes, deputy artistic director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; Anne Thurmann-Jajes, from the Center … Continued
The seminar The Boundary Condition: About the Archive and Its Limits, directed by Maite Muñoz, was one of the events marking the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Study Center at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona – MACBA, in 2018 The aim was to examine the factors that shape the difficult definition of the … Continued
«El archivo, en sus numerosísimas manifestaciones posibles, es el repositorio por excelencia de la memoria y el recuerdo, herramientas indispensables en la construcción de la identidad tanto individual como colectiva. Entre los soportes en los que los documentos del archivo, a su vez, atrapan y fijan en el tiempo los recuerdos, la fotografía ocupa desde su invención un lugar…»
«Manuel Raeder has been working on publishing and design projects for more than 15 years. He has run his own design office, Studio Manuel Raeder, since 2009, and in 2013 founded the publishing label Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite , a platform for challenging…»
«In June 2013, Jamie Allen and Bernhard Garnicnig took three steps to set in motion the collaborative, fragmented and remotely controlled project My Holy Nacho. To start with, they selected six different used objects that were being sold on well-known web pages. Then…»
The core of My Holy Nacho, an artistic project by Jamie Allen and Bernhard Garnicnig, is “immaterial” work: remote, delocalized, triggered only by instructions sent by digital means. Over more than a year, these two artists commissioned various services from successive industrial suppliers throughout the world, limiting their communication to mere emails. My contribution to … Continued
In 2015, an agreement was reached so that the documenta Archive, which had been dependent on the Kassel City Council since its creation, would be transferred to the organization responsible for the documenta exhibitions. That same year I was commissioned to carry out a comprehensive study which would reflect the current status of the archive, … Continued
In 2014, archive collector José María Lafuente decided to make his public his considerable collection of documents and personal papers related to Western art in the 20th century. My contribution to this move had to do with developing a structure and the contents for the Archive’s first website, as well as establishing models for the … Continued
«Such was the panorama at the dawn of the new millennium: despite the evidence of the inextricable relation between work and document in the artistic output of the 20th century, in Spain – and in Latin America for that matter – there were hardly any important bibliographic collections for documenting it…»
«…When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969 / Venice 2013, abierta al público entre junio y noviembre de 2013 en la sede veneciana de la Fundación Prada, es un ejemplo particularmente interesante de esta tendencia. El reto, en este caso, consistía en “recuperar” la mítica exposición de 1969…»
«A partir de 1999, la idea de crear un centro de documentación que reuniese no solo publicaciones de referencia, sino también libros de artista, publicaciones especiales y todo tipo de material documental, pasó a formar parte de los planes de crecimiento del Museo, al mismo tiempo que el interés por la documentación vinculada al arte contemporáneo…»
Territorio Archivo, or «Archive Territory» [territorioarchivo.org], is a work-in-progress promoted by filmmaker Chus Domínguez and developed by Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia [www.fcayc.org/en], Peñaranda Cultural Centre (part of Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez) [cds.fundaciongsr.com], and a group of so-called “domestic preservers”. The photographs that make up the family albums of the residents in the surrounding regions of … Continued
«…The first magazine, entitled WC, which referred to the famous Fontaine (1917) by Marcel Duchamp, was a collective project that spanned five issues and adopted the format of an envelope which included wood engravings, collages, graphic compositions, foldable leaflets and texts-manifestos…»
«…The first magazine, entitled WC, which referred to the famous Fontaine (1917) by Marcel Duchamp, was a collective project that spanned five issues and adopted the format of an envelope which included wood engravings, collages, graphic compositions, foldable leaflets and texts-manifestos…»
The legacy of the versatile poet, playwright and visual artist Joan Brossa (Barcelona, 1919-1998), transferred to the MACBA Study Center in early 2012, is an excellent example of an archive whose structure simply blasts classical, straightforward classifications based on the typology of archive items. Brossa’s library, his personal archive and his art collection, impossible to … Continued
Between 1983 and 1993, Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942) interviewed 156 professionals from the art world, and then edited the more than 200 ensuing hours of video footage, cutting them into eight chapters that, in total, amount to around 40 min of video recordings. These went on to form part of the installation Between the Frames: … Continued
Artist Miralda’s archive encompasses souvenirs, fragments of his art works, books, cooking and eating artefacts from all over the world, artist’s publications, contributions by visitors to his many interactive installations, photographs, press clippings… In 2011, Miralda requested the MACBA Study Center to help him create a database which would manage such a complex pattern of … Continued
When the Catalan photographer Xavier Miserachs (Barcelona, 1937) passed away, in 1998, he left behind almost fifty years of professional practice, and an archive of over 80.000 photographic negatives. In 2010, it was my role to start a conversation with Miserachs’s heirs, previously approached through MACBA advisors, so as to draft a plan with a … Continued