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.
Archiving alters the object of its adoration: cataloguing displaces the object in favour of information, a process furthered by digitisation, which renders the physical object anachronistic, relegated to physical and economic fragility and irrelevance.
For a historian, the archive may help to construct a historical truth; for an artist, the archive can become a mine for creative research. Archived items may be used to create fiction, or fictive documents may support a fictitious reality or corroborate a constructed truth. Interpretation and research, stemming from selected and subjectively mediated collections, inevitably extend narratives. The archive is thus inherently fictive.
For the exhibition ‘Memories Gone Wild’ 17 artists and researchers who constitute the international group Fictive Archive Investigations present their personal and collaborative researches, which lie at the fictive and expanding edge of the archive.