Review of the international symposium ARCHIVING EXHIBITING – GOING OFF-SCRIPT IN ART ARCHIVES, Barcelona, 16-17 March 2023

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Traducció al català a càrrec de l’AAC de l’article original en anglès d’Eric Ketelaar aquí: “Review Archiving Exhibiting Barcelona symposium“.

Eric Ketelaar¹

Review of the international symposium ARCHIVING EXHIBITING – GOING OFF-SCRIPT IN ART ARCHIVES, Barcelona, 16-17 March, 2023²

Under the title ARCHIVING EXHIBITING – GOING OFF-SCRIPT IN ART ARCHIVES, an international symposium on art archiving took place on 16 and 17 March 2023, in Barcelona in the Museu Picasso Barcelona and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC). The Professional Association of Archives and Document Management of Catalonia (Associació de Professionals de l’Arxivística i la Gestió de Documents de Catalunya) collaborated with the two organizing museums. Around four hundred people attended the symposium, either by participating physically in the sessions at the two museums, or via on line streaming.

The symposium revolved around two concepts or practices or theories: ARCHIVING and EXHIBITING, particularly in the domain of art. As Jorge Blasco wrote, “the archive and the exhibition maintain continual relationships”.³ In art as in many other domains, an “archival turn” has led to using archives as a methodological lens to analyze and present entities and processes, quite often under the rubric of “the archive” rather than archives (plural).⁴ Archivists sometimes feel uncomfortable about this change from archives (as used within the archival profession) to archive as used by artists, curators and scholars. However, archives and archive are “boundary objects”, which “straddle many different communities of practice; any given object could be claimed by two or more communities.”⁵ In the field of art, “the archive means and does something quite different … than it does when it circulates in, say, literature or philosophy,” as Sara Calahan argues in her recent book Art+archive. Understanding the archival turn in contemporary art (2022).⁶

Nothing close to a divide between archivists and artists was noticeable during the symposium. On the contrary, both “traditional” record keepers and (post)modern artists, curators and scholars could feel “at home” while at the same time collaborating in creating a common space. The scientific committee (consisting of curators and archivists from both museums plus two entrepreneurs in archives and art⁷) had ensured that different communities of practice, methodology and theory were represented. The differences between them are flattened, once one accepts that archival and artistic practices are basic human practices. As one of the keynote speakers Ernst van Alphen remarked: most if not all people are involved in acts of classification, arrangement, selection, etc. Think of arranging books on a bookshelf, or using a mobile phone to capture images, or throwing away the restaurant’s receipt. They can be called archival practices. In my keynote speech Archive Art I proposed that not only archivists (archiveros), but various other people too, are ‘archivers’ (‘archivarios’) participating in the recursive production and mediation of the archive(s). The same applies to archive-art: artists and curators in creating and caring for archive-art are engaged in archiving. As Jorge Blasco has quipped: artists are “convertidos en archiveros”.⁸

Converted or not: artists, curators and archivists can learn from each other’s practices. This is valid specifically with regard to the challenges of digital archive(s)/art, as I explained in my speech. A digital document is “an ephemeral manifestation. The same is true for digital instantiations of works of art — digital-born or digitized analogue materials. Preserving an art work or an archival document means enacting it by capturing the ephemeron, drawing on the reserves embedded in the originating instantiation of the work, at its inception.”

Such enactment is an activation of the archive/artwork, and each instantiation will add to the meaning of the artefact. Meaning is something made by different people at different times. Ramon Alberch took this up in his keynote speech Arxius polièdrics, continguts plurals (Polyhedral archives, plural contents). He presented six cases, each showing an aspect of the multifaceted archives.

Laura Millar joined the symposium live from Canada to deliver a speech Art, Artifice, Archives: Considering the links between facts, evidence and truth. Drawing on her book A Matter of Facts: The Value of Evidence in an Information Age (2019) she made the case that without access to evidence, societies cannot understand fact-based truth. Records, archives, and data are not just useful tools, she argued, but also essential sources of evidence, today and in the future. Indeed, as I stressed in my speech, “Without evidence no accountability and no memory. Accountability and memory reside in records, because records are evidence.” Laura also discussed how archivists can manage the transformation of the traditional archival role influenced by digital technologies. Archivists and curators (and to a certain extent: artists too) could benefit from her insights.

The morning sessions were devoted to archiving, in the afternoon sessions the presentations were focusing on exhibiting. Beatrice von Bismarck (Germany), in her keynote speech Archives on show, discussed curatorial procedures and strategies that participate in the reformulation of the aesthetic, social and political meaning and function of archives. Some of this came back in the presentation by Debora Rossi, head of La Biennale di Venezia Archives (Italy), titled The Muses and the Archive. For quite some time, the Biennale Archives were overlooked by the artistic directors of the Biennale (many archivists will recognize this dilemma of record creators not being much interested in their own archives). However, in 2020, a special exhibition was organized in the Central Pavilion at the Giardini, Le muse inquiete (The Disquieted Muses) curated for the first time together with the artistic directors of the six Biennale departments.

The keynote speech by Ernst van Alphen (Netherlands) focused on archival practices by artists, how they challenge the problem of archival homogenization and classification, and how they make use of archives in order to explore alternative historical knowledge and narratives. Among the cases Van Alphen discussed were Walid Raad’s Atlas Group project (“close to being part of an icon of archive art”⁹): an imaginary archive, kept by an imaginary archivist and augmented with new material by imaginary donors. Another case was the Ringelblum Archive, created in the Warsaw ghetto and then buried as a monument for future memory.

Not imaginary at all were the cases presented at the symposium by practicing artists and curators and archivists. Each of the two museums presented a project of archiving art. Cas Arxiu Brigitte Baer: una estratigrafia (Archive Brigitte Baer Case: a stratigraphy) presented by Sílvia Domènech, and Núria Solé Bardalet, of the Museu Picasso, and Els límits de la voluntat en els arxius dels artistes. El fons Hermen Anglada Camarasa com a exemple (The limits of willingness in the archives of artists. The Hermen Anglada Camarasa collection as an example), presented by Pilar Cuerva of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. The latter presentation served also as an introduction to the visit to the museum’s exhibition Anglada Camarasa. The premeditated archive. Camarasa (1871-1949) created his archives to preserve and dignify his work and his artistic career, but also as a means of creating an image for posterity. The exhibition was put up in a make-believe archival repository, with on one side shelf after shelf full of (empty) grey archival boxes and glass cases with documents from the archives, and on the opposite wall paintings and other works by Camarasa. One might interpret the installation in different ways, for example as a critique of the archival rules that generally prohibit access to the repository.

Two artists were “live” at the symposium. Perejaume (Pere Jaume Borrell i Guinart) had provided the organizers with no more than a title La vida de les obres (The life of the works), thus shielding himself from excessive anticipation that might spoil the possible vividness and possible surprise of everything that the word can come to tell us. And telling he did —and very poetically too—about the healing capacities of archives. The other artist “in residence” was Mireia Saladrigues who staged a performance Into sugar we could have turned, centering on the attack on Michelangelo’s Pietà (21 May 1972) and its archival follow-up. Constantly moving between a few objects on the floor of the imposing oval hall of the MNAC, Saladrigues was activating documents, narratives and other materials, while navigating between police and scientific archives, speculative fiction, autobiography and geology.

Another performance was presented by the French historian Philippe Artières: Maniements d’archives (Handling of archives). In 2017 Artières set up a simple bureau at (or in front of) the Centre Pompidou in Paris, every Thursday for a couple of hours, by his performance inviting people to bring documents and souvenirs which would constitute les Archives populaires du Centre Pompidou. These archives, so he hoped, would ultimately preserve all the impressions that people have or have had in their relationship with the Centre Pompidou. This experience served as a case study investigating how we could transfer vernacular archival practices to institutional places of heritage (the museum or archive centre).

One of the presented case studies concerned the Sala Colonial Project. Catarina Simao was invited by the museum in Lamego (Portugal) to develop an artistic and pedagogical project called “Sala Colonial” in reference to the room where, from 1938 onwards, a collection of African artifacts belonging to the former National Lyceum of Lamego had been on display. The project had to deal with various archival and museological challenges, linked to identifying, naming, decolonizing, structuring and restoring objects.

(De)colonization was also a concern of Michael Karabinos (Netherlands) in his presentation Reactivating Historical Archives in Art and Design Museums. Through cases at two Dutch museums (the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam) Karabinos explored various projects that involved reimagining the archival collections. The Van Abbemuseum was founded by Henri van Abbe (1880-1940), a successful manufacturer of cigars. Absent from the official histories of his collection and the museum are the indigenous workers in Sumatra (Indonesia) who harvested the tobacco for Van Abbe’s cigars. To what extent should the colonial provenance of the Van Abbe museum be taken into account? Karabinos also paid attention to the Collecting Otherwise working group at Het Nieuwe Instituut.¹⁰

While various papers dealt with art in the archives, José Luís Bonal presented archives in art El documento a través del arte: un recorrido por las representaciones de los documentos de archivo en las obras de la National Gallery (The document through art: a tour of the representations of archive documents in the works of the National Gallery). Among the artefacts in the National Gallery in London, Bonal has identified 266 artworks which show an archival document. These artworks were classified (in itself an archival operation) using different parameters. Especially in religious artworks a document may serve as a prop, bearing a special connection to the portrayed subject. Sometimes, a very specific and even identifiable document is included in the artwork. I would have loved to hear more about the reception of these ‘documentary artworks’ by contemporaries of the artist, because that might expose ‘the image’ of documenting and archiving in society.¹¹

It will not be a surprise: the symposium has been archived (via YouTube), and will be archived by a forthcoming publication of the conference papers.

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1 Emeritus professor in archivistics, University of Amsterdam. Email eketelaar@xs4all.nl

2 I have used the summaries in the programme (https://simposiarxiusdart.cat/en/), blending with my own arguments. The four discussion panels are not reviewed.

3 Jorge Blasco Gallardo, ‘Notes on the possibility of an exhibited archive’, in: Jorge Blasco Gallardo and Nuria Enguita Mayo (eds), Culturas de archivos. Archive cultures (Fundació Antoni Tàpies and Ediciones Universidad Salamanca, 2002), p. 194.

4 Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archival turns and returns. Studies of the archive’, in: Anne J. Gilliland, Sue McKemmish and Andrew J. Lau (eds.), Research in the archival multiverse, (Monash University Press, Clayton 2016), pp. 228-268.

5 Geoffrey Yeo, ‘Concepts of record (2): prototypes and boundary objects’, American Archivist 71 (2008): 131.

6 Sara Callahan, Art+archive. Understanding the archival turn in contemporary art (Manchester University Press 2022), p. 291.

7 The members of the Scientific committee were Pilar Cuerva (head of Centre de Recerca i Coneixement (CREC) of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya), Sílvia Domènech (head of the Centre de Coneixement i Recerca of the Museu Picasso Barcelona), Jorge Blasco (researcher, writer and curator), Mela Dávila (curator and consultant on art archives and artist’s publications), Remei Barbero (archivist of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya), Núria Solé Bardalet (archivist of the Museu Picasso Barcelona).

8 Jorge Blasco Gallardo, ‘Ceci n’est pas une archive’, https://revistafakta.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/ceci-nest-pas-une-archive-por-jorge-blasco-gallardo/ [Texto original publicado en Estévez, Fernando y de Santa Ana, Mariano (eds.) Memorias y olvidos del archivo, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Lampreave, 2010, p. 11-19]

9 Callahan, p. 270.

10 https://nieuweinstituut.nl/en/projects/collecting-otherwise/activiteiten

11 Eric Ketelaar, ‘Accountability portrayed. Documents on regents’ group portraits in the Dutch Golden Age’, Archival Science 14 (2014): 69-93. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10502-013-9210-0/fulltext.html