Collection and archives

The archive is the collection. The collection is the archive.

Far from the idea of a dusty group of labyrinthine bookcases or piled boxes with encoded labels that once had a clear meaning, the archive of today has recovered its image as a dynamic database, something more akin to the experience of using a dictionary, searching a list of potentially complementary terms to rebuilt a story. Why are these things connected, grouped here, in the archive? says the detective. What does this box of papers and files mean? Most importantly, for who?

Thanks to Moore's law, among many other factors, it is also a daily reality that new technologies, widening the capacity to absorb data, have entered the dialogue of the archiving spirit, creating their own layers of documentation over which users create their own layer of curation, since curation, as we said before, is implicit in the act of archiving.

Data and meta-data.

We could say that before only the wealthy could exercise the act of collecting and therefore store and preserve, while the rest of us could only consume or produce, but not maintain objects or documents in that floating status of being there but exclusively for contemplation or study ruminations using leisure time. But now the digital space has widened the illusion of ownership and in doing so, crafting space for curation and collections of all guises and tastes:

Like the post, save the post, organize it into a collection. Archive it. Share it.

Regarding the nature of the archive and its definition and the many aspects that we take for granted about our notions of the act of archiving but also the ideas we held about repositories of any kind. Because of the subtle subjectivity of the notion of the archive, constrained by its own materiality, accepting the idea that the map is not the territory, and that reality must be degraded and stripped of a certain amount of layers of information to become an archive, arts and media have taken it as an element of creation, an imprint left by others to us in translating their own view of what was archivable and worth of preservation. You must choose, and in choosing, revealing yourself.

Therefore, from sometime ago to now, the archives are entering the space of creative materials. They can be used to create discourses and pieces, like in the work, among many others, of Erick Beltran (b. Mexico, 1974), whose work is a kind of metaphysic of the diagram, based on an accurate digging of collections pilled one upon another across decades. The work that Beltran showed at Documenta Kassel in 2022 was a complex installation of archival figures and diagrams that Beltran creates himself to explain his own practice, side to side to his own archival extractions, transforming the explanation into the work, giving a new meaning to the phrase "walk the talk" in terms of art and archive simbiosis.

Collection and archives are linked to storage but also to conservation. To preserve something is a multi-generational agreement, where people have agreed that somehow, an object is worth preserving, with care and dedication because it meant something to them as a society. The mummies of the fourteen sovereigns of the Inca empire were burned and disappeared because of that very reason by Pizarro and the Spaniards, and Carthage was razed to the ground by Scipio and the Roman legions, but the headdress of Moctezuma was taken to Vienna, and Murillo's Assumption taken to Paris.

It is a process that is basically a cultural edition of the world: this goes out, this stays in. After all, what is traditional art history - any history, for that matter- other than a curatorial project, perpetuated towards a consecrated posterity, designed to morph into a future canon?

Also, it follows in tandem a logic of accumulation and hoarding. When you visit the top museums in the world, you can see the vastness of this logic. Yes, like the Louvre. Galleries and galleries follow one another in an endless, alluvial, sedimented path of objects gathered somehow -this word making a heavy lifting here- inside the perimeters of the cultural arch that is the museum.

In tandem with the era of information anxiety, the curation of archives proposes an alternative way of approaching the very contemporary phenomenon of flowing data deluges, interrogating vast troves of cultural information with a critical eye through data science, using data visualization and other techniques arising from different fields, to extract the top essential 5 things you must know if you are into X/Y/Z discipline.

As an artist and designer, I became conscious that the act of curating, and mediating-either other people's work or your own-is a requisite of any critical practice. As a designer, I have been familiar with the work of professionals in areas such as information design or digital humanities and seen how data can open new paths to interpretation, approaching bodies of work and collections. As an artist, I crave the development of intertextuality between different meanings developed in a particular historical/geographical context to be used to rebuild new webs of meaning/objects to widen the perspective of our work and question both the future and the past.

Because it is a basic requisite that curation, as a profession, needs skills in discourse-building -you may call it storytelling, if this word were not so polysemantic and malleable in today's parlour- and in this particular sense, it has the ower to affect an artistic practice with its approach to knowledge in general and art in particular, in creating the narrative, the "thematic kernel" of projects, and in this aspect, provide a renewed set of conceptual tools to approach the objects-the artworks.

The current availability of meanings and visual cultural encodings requires a guiding framework to assert the meaningfulness of the practice. All this, with the purpose of opening and defining new ways for interpretation into/from specific realities that might not get the attention of the mainstream art market.?To thread across different or seemingly unconnected realms. Was that always the case? Certainly, as a recipe for innovation, we are told. It is a counterpart to the rigid definition that intuition also detects in bodies of work. As I see it, the critical thinking underlying criticism and curation has become a tool and a framework necessary for artistic practice. That is why it is important to know the why and the how of cultural manifestations (artworks, etc)that are put forward.