RESISTANT ARCHIVES

This symposium stems from a research initiative dedicated to the exploration of the Skulptur Projekte Archives Münster, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation for a period of three years. An ongoing project since its foundation in 1977, the curatorial archive, following the exhibition’s genesis as a public art program, has been primarily Western-oriented, with a marked focus on North American and Western European postwar sculpture. This symposium proposes a change in perspective in order to situate the archival logic within an expanded global cultural context and to challenge its conceptual aspects in the future. How can we rethink the exhibition format of the Skulptur Projekte through the archive, namely as a site that renegotiates power relations and reveals the hegemonic remains of the institutional art system and urban territories? Which power dispositifs define archival orders and how can these be modified, rescripted, and put into practice to access their democratic potential?

The following themes shape the symposium and offer a multivalent approach to central questions, conflicts, and challenges that have been marked by the work on the archive in a variety of research projects related to this resource. The archival holdings have informed numerous international master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, whose authors will present their research for discussion. Their work builds upon concepts that gain new relevance with respect to the following: temporal and durational artistic practices; local and global challenges in urban contexts; anthropogenic climate change (i. e. Maria Nordman, herman de vries, Jeremy Deller, Pierre Huyghe); critical approaches to power dispositifs; and techno-aesthetic mediations of archival material.

Urban Memory: The Archive as Public Matter

When installed in public space, art enters a whole new environment where conventional museum procedures and attitudes are no longer applicable. Sculptures installed in public space lack clear institutional reference points that would confer them the status of art, so they automatically settle in alongside other urban objects, in an ambiguous and heterogenous zone. In order to consider the interrelated aspects of this cultural milieu as part of the expanded archive, scholars must develop new approaches that consider the specificities of public space, the local context, and the establishment of dialogue with the local community. This dynamic between public art and the archive as a public matter also underscores the relevance of ephemeral and performative processes as ‘sedimentations’ of non-canonized, plural, and resistant histories to be written (Griesser/Sternfeld 2018). These include the situated knowledge of grassroots organizations and environmental activists, grey literature, and unofficial documentation.

Critical Care: Terrestrial Archives – Ecology as Heritage

This theme builds on the notion that an archive of public art projects has taken shape at a time when ecological demands intersecting with experimental scientific and aesthetic practices, political ecology, and environmental justice have come into focus. Historically situated between the publication of the Club of Rome’s resolution “The Limits to Growth” in 1972 and the founding of the Green Party in Germany in 1980, the genesis of the Skulptur Projekte – with its conceptual framework of removing art from its institutional setting and creating contact zones between urban space and the wider social and natural environment – took place in a climate of democratic awakening. Indeed, Chancellor Willy Brandt’s legislation inspired the exhibition’s founder, Klaus Bussmann, as well as Kasper König. 

The exhibition’s contemporaneity with and close connection to the emergence of an ecological consciousness and social movements is also echoed by artworks documented in the Skulptur Projekte Archives. Today, the consequences of depleted soil, rising CO2 emissions, the destruction of ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, and exhaustion of natural resources are hotly debated in current public and political discourses. The claims for environmental justice by grassroots organizations and social movements around the globe are highly relevant and especially urgent in the new climatic regime (Latour 2017), which is characterized by flagrant social inequalities, forced migration, and nationalistic political agendas, in which the effects of ecological, political, cultural, and economic crises are inherently intertwined. Questions concerning the interrelations between ecology and (cultural) heritage gain momentum in the Age of the Anthropocene, where these categories offer an intersectional perspective on violence against living environments. How does the archive relate to artistic practices and methods of preservation in the natural and cultural environment? Can environmental and climate concerns, such as the destruction of the tropical rainforest and the infringement upon Indigenous rights, be negotiated along the same trajectory as the protection of cultural heritage; the maintenance of museums, archives, and architecture; and the preservation of the immaterial traditions and cultural spheres of local communities? 

Against this backdrop, this aspect of the symposium seeks to critically examine the way ecology is aestheticized and visually mediated (Demos 2017). At the same time, it aims to explore art’s potential to imagine and enact new forms of solidarity through collaborative approaches to organizing (Lütticken 2019), counteracting ‘conservative’ tendencies to perpetuate a status quo (Rolnik 2017). Aesthetic practices can generate reflexive and responsive situations that poetically intensify the complexity of the entanglements between human and non-human lifeforms, technology, and ecology (Haraway 2016). In this sense, they draw upon techno-scientific experimentations, visualizations, simulations, and mappings, in which technology neither indulges escapist fantasies nor caters to geo-engineering projects meant to stabilize human-induced environmental damage. As opposed to universalizing aesthetics and all-encompassing solutions on a macropolitical scale, such aesthetic approaches suggest micropolitical practices that consider interdependent, relational, and sympoietic forms of coexistence.

On the Politics of Obsolescence: Forensic Archives and the Colonial Unconscious

Working both ways, archives entangle the past and the future by deconstructing naturalized frameworks that are maintained as the political status quo. Archival practices and curatorial as well as artistic interventions within archives have highlighted the fact that social change is possible and ideological boundaries can be overcome by making the instability of existing orders tangible and by revealing the indefinite structure of global power hierarchies that remain in place today. The traditional modalities of the archive are, on the one hand, deeply interwoven with the protagonists who occupy the positions of power and who administer access to its content. On the other hand, the archive functions as an articulatory practice for those whose histories have been excluded by the archive’s own bureaucratic law. In the field of art, these dimensions of the archive have been explored using methods of intersectional analysis that serve as reflexive instruments, registering and recording the mutations inflicted upon the human condition at times of crisis or during political and social conflicts, from early Modernism to the post-colonial critique. These methods provide a basis for confronting the blind spots of ideological, political, and cultural legacies. Given this perspective, the relevance of archival practices is also underscored by the reconstruction and contextualization of cultural producers whose work has fallen into oblivion and whose entry to the archive was thwarted due to their gender and/or ethnicity. In view of the different dynamics of such artistic approaches to the archive, its frame is expanded by practices of display and with the aim to share its productive potentialities. The engagement with the archive’s colonial unconscious challenges the traditional notion of its bureaucratic origin and raises a sense of its civic responsibility by making resources accessible that reference precarious events, biographies, or processes that were otherwise kept hidden and withheld from collective memory.

Archives as Commons: Access and Future Perspectives

The varied and repeated use of archival methods as both aesthetic as well as socio-political statements mark this symposium’s point of departure. By shifting the focus to the marginal zones of cultural milieus, which are shaped by political and economic conditions, this symposium explores the undercurrents and contradictions of the archive’s own character, but with a clear sense of the networks that connect many different and distant localities under the wider conditions of contemporary forms of production, reception, and consumption of art in the public domain. The political is inevitably a part of this artistic practice, which anchors its poetic force in the constellations of the social environment. Indeed, the archival project becomes a public matter when it serves as a historically resonant emancipatory alternative and as a poetic praxis that transcends cultural and aesthetic boundaries through new alliances. Accordingly, the curatorial practice related to archives must offer a greater variety of expansive gestures that cross institutional boundaries and open their contents to multivalent interpretations. Various social and cultural groups as well as states have demanded access to archives and cultural objects. Digital transformation has fundamentally widened the possibilities and conditions of archives as part of the commons and it will continue to bring about new forms and practices of production, reproduction, distribution, reception, and interaction with archives. New, dynamic, and potentially democratic ways of accessing archives are emerging in this vein. This symposium aims to explore both curatorial as well as artistic approaches to the epistemic concept of the archives as a globally networked project of public concern.

The Impulse Symposium is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation in collaboration with the University of Münster (WWU) and the LWL Museum of Art and Culture as part of the research project The Skulptur Projekte Archives Münster. A Research Institution for Scholarship and the Public (2017–2020).

Literature (selection):

Azoulay, Ariella: “Archive,” translated by Tal Haran, in: Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, issue 1, 2017; http://www.politicalconcepts.org/issue1/archive/ (Accessed September 12, 2020).

Demos, T. J.: Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, Berlin: Sternberg Press 2017.

Griesser, Martina/Sternfeld, Nora: “Sedimented Conflicts and Alternative Archives: Creating (or Confronting) Collections,” in: Collecting in Time, online publication by the GfZK Leipzig, 2018; https://collecting-in-time.gfzk.de/en (Accessed December 10, 2019).

Haraway, Donna: Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham/London: Duke University Press 2016.

Latour, Bruno: Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge: Polity Press 2017.

Lütticken, Sven: “Toward a Terrestrial,” in: e-flux journal, no. 103, October 2019; https://www.e- flux.com/journal/103/291974/toward-a-terrestrial/ (Accessed December 13, 2019).

Rolnik, Suely: “The Spheres of Insurrection,” in: e-flux journal, no. 86, November 2017; https://www.e-flux.com/journal/86/163107/the-spheres-of-insurrection-suggestions-for-combating- the-pimping-of-life/ (Accessed December 11, 2019).