The archive is now at a « mnemonic turn ». Once considered a pledge of truth in order to grasp history, it is now reused by contemporary artists and even made as a source of plastic creation. Transformation of the historical process becomes a research matter. Under approaches comparable to archaeology and even police investigations, the meaning of the archive decipher, question, turn over and call on the contemporary artist as the potential for imaginary new forms. Between history and creation. Between document and fiction.
The archive is based on cultural expectation – cultural constructs affect the archive. It proposes objectivity, an external unmediated truth created for its own sake, but is always open to interpretation. Merely by virtue of being inherently selective it is necessarily subjective; it is in itself evidence of its own processes of selectivity and ordering.
The archive, perceived as a repository of information relating to one or more individuals, an organization or location, contributes to the construction of what we perceive as truth. It attests to a palpable past: its position is concrete, unassailable, authoritative. However, its selectivity alone betrays its subjectivity. The processes of retaining, accumulating, sorting, acquiring, and cataloguing include absences, losses and destructions, rendering the archive inherently incomplete, always open-ended.