The Collective Archive by Ana de Almeida

The Collective Archive project starts from the personal photo collection of José Alberto Vidal de Almeida, my father, a Portuguese stipend student in former Czechoslovakia between 1978 and 1987 – an archive originally stored inside a shoe box. Whilst this photo collection contents extensive documentation of a mix of both personal and historical events, the research conducted around this archive allows a parallel following of the final years of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, before the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and the first years after the left wing Carnation Revolution in Portugal that allowed the end of 48 years of fascist regime, as well as the end of the Portuguese Colonial War in April 1974. Forming a network of complex and indelible relations between personal and national histories as well as between local and global history, my father's photographs are the substrate upon which I seek to research about what meant the group of happenings for both countries and at the same time to investigate how the individual awareness of the witnessed events was formed, hence aiming to address the question of how are actually defined and transmitted important historical marks. One cannot dispose of the collocation of the individual understanding in the building of an historical narrative, emphasizing the individual position clarifies history’s arbitrary character. Each individual act of image production is an act of significance. What follows is the transformation of the shoe box as a depository of photos into an archive and the articulation of the lived and of the transmitted (inscribed) experience with the macro-political and historical processes. Opening the box will necessarily means, in a first instance, to give a voice to my father, which means the transformation of the essay into a gradual quest for finding more voices within the archive. The theoretical and the artistic thought must be problematized, made distinct and at the same time entangled, and importantly they must be taken to their limits in order to re-establish them. The future becomes the issue of the archive and the voice that should be finally found is the one of a collective practice.

Ana de Almeida, The Collective Archive - Installation Essay, 2014 at Schneiderei Home.Studio.Gallery Vienna, Austria

Ana de Almeida, The Collective Archive - Installation Essay, 2014 at Schneiderei Home.Studio.Gallery Vienna, Austria

Ana de Almeida

The Collective Archive

IV.

FORM AND ARTISTIC PRACTICE

The formulation of an artistic thesis[6] could only be possible in conjunction with the research on the possibilities of a formulation of a concept of the archivology in Contemporary Art.

In her book Performing the Archive: The Transformation of the Archive in Contemporary Art, from Repository of Documents to Art Medium,Brazilian art critic and historian Simone Osthoff, continuously bridges the documentary art practice with possibilities for working the archive within Contemporary art. Starting from the notion of the archive as a repository of documents, as described in the title, to the problematization of the artistic practice; one that deals with documents Osthoff guides us through the oeuvre of several Brazilian artists. The techniques of archivization play a central role in Osthoff’s writing in the same way as they do in the works of Lygia Clark, Hélio Oticica, Paulo Bruscky and Eduardo Kac, but more than writing on art works, Osthoff calls on the projects of these Brazilian artists to develop and consolidate a collective, interdisciplinary and transmedia thought.

Among the different questions raised by Osthoff’s research, the relation between the archealogical and documentary practice in contemporary art and the practice that problematizes the processes and techniques of archivization marks an important distinction in the midst of a general discourse that often mixes both.

Documentation has recurringly been used as both a starting point and reflection point, and as material in contemporary art. Documentary practice in contemporary art developed across several media, not always sharing a formal style or a common conceptual approach proving impossible to call it a “genre”. If documentary artistic practices do not necessarily address the archive or a concept of archivology, the archive nevertheless (in its external and hypomnesic dimension) deals with a substrate that is often considered documental. If there are differences between the documental and the archive, it is their entanglements that make literature on documentary practices in contemporary art a fertile ground for the finding of direct reflections about the archive and processes of archivization.

In Portuguese, when we are presented with imagens de arquivo (archive images) we immediately know that we are about to see documental images. But what is the difference between a “documental image” and an “archive image”? Does the application of the term refer to a characterization that carries the intrinsic meaning of belonging to somewhere (archive)? Perhaps the very first question should be: what is a documental image?

I propose that what makes an image documental is the linking of its existence with either the past or the future, but never with the present. In both the action of establishing images as documents from the past and the one of producing documentary images as containers of information for the future (independent of how immediate or distant it may be), we find the same notion of evidence or register.

More than a way of recording and representing reality, documentation is an attempted form of permanence. Documentation seeks to create taxonomic directing lines: parallel to reality and representing reality as residual and schematic matter. Documentation does not aim to clone reality, to reproduce an event for the second time, but instead to coexist with it in its own plan.

Besides the alleged search for impartiality defended by the factual nature of documentation, this particular language, unwittingly or not, is responsible for the creation of new semantics. If the document testifies to the existence of the fact, what happens when a rupture of the coexistence between documentation and reality takes place? The border between fiction and reality blurs --- as mainly in historical, social and personal terms reality is built over a posteriori deemed to be accurate and true – over the documental.

How does the thematization of the documental then find place in contemporary art, what is put at risk through this appropriation?

The Center for Curatorial Studies at the Bard College’s The Green Room – Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1 edited by Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl proposes to overcome the dispersion of the discussion of the documental phenomenon in contemporary art (Lind, Steyerl 12).

The question of documentary authenticity automatically leads us to a notion of truth. Would it then be a questioning of this notion or a total rupture of it that constitutes the premise for the reconsideration of the documentary and of contemporary art itself?

The crisis of modernity also impacts on the documentary’s traditional truth claims. While the notion of a document is historically tied to ideas of certitude and confirmation and is primarily used in the legal realm, thus certitude has all but vanished from contemporary consciousness (Lind, Steyerl 16), the work analyzed by different authors throughout the publication have in common either a conscious distancing from this notion or its problematization at their core. In Osthoff’s Performing the Archive, there is the idea of a process, one of reconsideration, as well as the archive through the artistic practice. If it is a hypomnesic nature that archive shares with the documental, we should not forget that according to Derrida the archive presupposes an activation, it presupposes a moment of consignation to an exterior place, but it presupposes as well a moment of inscription. Osthoff questions the limitations of the archive as mere hypomnesic apparatus, and questions, together with the artists, our belief that everything should be safely stored and documented. (Osthoff 177).

The techniques of archivization play a central role in this reflection and revolve around the possibilities and consequences of the use of new technologies. A growing access to recording devices, and the ubiquity of documenting does not mark the apogee of archiving, on the contrary it announces the impossibility of re-living or storing experience and precedes the rupture with the idea of an infinite depository, as the more we document the more information we produce, the less time we have to analyze it, and the further we are from where we started. (Osthoff 177)

The focus on the techniques of archivization in this essay, re-encounters Freud’s mystic pad and Derrida’s prediction of a telecommunications technology that moves closer to the way our memory works; the notions of fragmentation and of breaking with an established linearity of time, are now part of the very processes of producing and of storing information. New technologies as new techniques of archivization are considered in theoretical and artistic essays through Derrida’s conception of their agency of producing and at the same time establishing the archive. Nonetheless, , what is new in Osthoff’s theoretical analysis and in Kac’s artistic proposal is an idea of archival disruption.

●

When Suely Rolnik writes about the effects of totalitarian regimes on culture (Rolnik 7) and its macro-political and micro-political manifestations (ex. macro-political manifestation: censorship; micro-political effect: the inhibition of desire resulting from the inscription of personal and collective traumatic experiences in the immaterial memory of the body), there is also at stake two different kinds of artistic practices.

The specific political character of the artistic practices that we are considering here lies in what they give occasion to in the environs that are affected by them. The issue is to be aware not of the tension (of their extensive representational, macro-political face) but of the experience of this state within the body itself, and of the effect mobilized by the forces that make them up (their intensive, unconscious, micro-political face). (Rolnik 11)

Suely Rolnik in Archive Mania writes about a compulsion to work the archive as a paradigm of the globalized art world, while proposing to analyze the origins of this phenomenon. She writes about the politics of archiving and that “such politics should be distinguished on the bases of the poetic force that an archiving device can transmit rather than on that of its technical or methodological forces” (Rolnik 4)

When it comes to form, Rolnik writes that another misunderstanding that tends to emerge in this situation is the assumption that within the artistic practice in which political potential is affirmed, form is irrelevant (Rolnik 10). Rolnik defends that on the contrary, the formal rigor of the work is inseparable from an ethical rigor that implies taking charge of the demands of life to remain in process and from an esthetical rigor that renders the affects of the world in the body sensible. For Rolnik the effectiveness of the art work can only be achieved through this inseparability. The seductive power of the art work grows together with the precision of the artistic language. (Rolnik 10)

On the other hand, this form of artistic practice does not exist independently or autonomously, which approximates the Conceptualist logic of artistic production from which, according to Suely Rolnik, the art from the mid-70’s produced in Latin America was left outside of Western hegemonic art historiographies. In a way, what Rolnik defends is that the same conceptualist logic behind the questioning and problematization of the authoritarianism of the Institutional art world, and what applies to so-called (and by the same Western hegemonic historiographies) Latin American political conceptual art, being that the agents of influence or repression exercised over the artists and artistic expressions was extended to the general politics of authoritarian states. (Rolnik 7) The difference between the categorization of conceptual art or political conceptual art (with which there is clearly a disagreement) would be a question of scale.

What I find interesting about Rolnik’s thesis is the observation that in terms of form and aesthetics, the works that deal with macro-politics and with the archive follow the same interdependency with the tension that forces the artistic practice forward as with works of Conceptual art in general. The notion of mapping is also present when Rolnik describes what happens once the art practice in which political potential is affirmed reaches this formal, ethical and aesthetic rigor. A new politics of desire and its relationship to the world is the drawn – new diagrams of the unconscious in the social field, actualized through reconfigurations of the current cartography. In conclusion it is a vital rigor that opposes those forces that draw maps in order to cripple life at its core, and that consists, as we have seen, in a persistent renewing of itself in the permanent creation of the world. (Rolnik 10)

Rolnik deduces that a counterculture lost to melancholic politics of desire, one responsible for a generation of propagation of forms from the 60’s and the 70’s while ignoring the forces that caused them. Rolnik talks about the forces responsible for these forms and that have to be extricated from them. For Rolnik the way to re-establish a connection to these forces (that are far from extinct, a current example would be the nomination of Dilma Roussef for president of Brazil), would be to pass over the old forms for the creation of new ones. In Rolnik’s formulation we find the opposite to an idea of rescuing, or retrieving something from the archive, and instead come towards a notion of mapping a pre-existent field to which an intentionality of the formulation of new present possibilities is added.

In my works V for OF and V for MFA, two wall paintings that respectively reproduce the symbols of the Občanské fórum - Civic forum - the Czech political movement headed by Vacláv Havel and established at the time of the Velvet Revolution with the self-proclaimed aim of overthrowing the Communist regime; and of the Movimento das Forças Armadas - Armed forces movement - the military organisation responsible by the coup that gave origin to the Carnation Revolution in Portugal - these directly address the formal concept of revolution, showing two historical forms of the V sign hand gesture used as motif for nearly paradoxical political processes.

Working the archive through an artistic practice exists as the final stage of this essay. The idea of a research-based artistic practice is a challenging one to which we nevertheless have to add the imbalance brought by the academic conditioning of the theoretical essay in formal aspects and in terms of a normalization that extricates it from an interdependency with an artistic one.

In The Collective Archive - installation essay, I have tried, for the first time, to build a formal strategy in working with this archive. Different objects and still/moving images are installed in the space, that the artist-in-person acts as the trigger for a linear (but potentially multi-directional) discourse of relations between them. This discursive practice that formally sustains the artistic research project, which I call an installation essay, has certain parallels with the mechanisms of the video essay or the artist book. Through a performative lecture or presentation, the theoretical structure of the project is rendered visible. The overhead projector is the main element/tool, it has the double function of projecting new layers of analysis and meaning to the images and graphics on the walls and of casting light on the different elements of the installation, directing in this way the choreographed sequence that sets the pace and linear structure of the presentation. Although I have only activated the installation essay once, its elements are set up in a way which allows a multiple re-staging of the lecture performance.

The installation is composed of different elements, such as a permutative table drawn on the floor - which determines my position as the orator, marking the place where I am speaking from as the above-mentioned intersection between time-space coordinates of where are we looking from and what are we looking at; graphic materials that organise and reveal information regarding the motifs and situations portrayed in my father’s photographs; transparent foil sheets that work in a similar way as a footnote quotation system for the artistic essay, allowing me to refer to the work of other artists and to the interconnections of a scattered artistic practice that deals with the different aspects of the Portuguese Revolution in various methods, such as the works by Filipa César, Carla Filipe or Manuel Botelho; analytical schemes and several short videos, such as the above mentioned Mesa, Mesa II and Sequência de versos or Marta, a video attempt at creating a character inspired by a real person (the daughter of my father’s friend and colleague), who received the legacy of the same archive through her mother, and is a character that works as a mirrored image of myself and that attempts to explore the possibilities for a micro-political processing of the patriarchal legacy of the archive. The Collective Archive - Installation essay is so far the main piece of the artistic research project and constitutes an experimental attempt at creating a new form of archivization. Quite distant from an idea of translation, in which a specific theoretical proposal would be translated into an artistic one, such a hybrid practice aims for the development of the topics raised in this essay through such distinct ways that it can only come to independent formulations, developing and enriching the theoretical thesis but following its own path. An artistic approach carries within it the possibilities of activating the archive through the engagement in participatory situations, opening it up to a collective practice.

page I << page II << >> Bibliography

Ana de Almeida, V for OF, wall painting (part of the No Need for References exhibition), 2015 at Kunsthalle Exnergasse Vienna, Austria - Installation view

Ana de Almeida, MFA logo deconstruction (part of The Collective Archive - Installation Essay), 2014 at Schneiderei Home.Studio.Gallery Vienna, Austria

Ana de Almeida, V for MFA, wall painting (part of the No Need for References exhibition), 2015 at Kunsthalle Exnergasse Vienna, Austria

Ana de Almeida, V for MFA, wall painting (part of the No Need for References exhibition), 2015 at Kunsthalle Exnergasse Vienna, Austria - Installation view

Ana de Almeida, V for OF, wall painting (part of the No Need for References exhibition), 2015 at Kunsthalle Exnergasse Vienna, Austria

[6] The use of the term thesis in its most general way for referring to the artistic essay that accompanies this theoretical one, is done with the intention to attenuate the constant imbalance between the theoretical and practical essays that should be, as far as possible, tantamount to each other in a conception of an hybrid research based art practice (or artistic research) that, before the formal academic need of separating both, contemplates the artistic process as more than the mere practical adaptation of the theses of a theoretical dissertation - leaving space for the possibility of coming to new conclusions and new formulations.

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