How does the archiving of an item change it, and how do we read the relationship between the different states? It is more complex than ‘the Greek bowl behind glass is a different thing from the Greek bowl in use for wine-drinking’.
The following lines are some reflexions about art, creation and fictious archives that I wrote down, when compiling my application for this group. I would like to share them with you, because they might be helpful for some.
Applications of fictive or imaginative thinking to the archive or collection may question the created objectivities of archiving, curating and cataloguing. The museum object should be considered not only in terms of the history of design, but in the light of comparison between the actual use experience of the object at the time of its first use with use of the object now, both as intended and by virtue of its role as a museum or archived object; and all stages in between.
L’archive est selon sa définition est un ensemble de documents concernant l’histoire d’une collectivité, d’une famille ou d’un individu. En ce sens, nous pouvons alors posséder nos propres archives familiales, du journal d’un arrière-grand-père, à la dernière photographie que l’on prend de soi, toute trace d’une existence peu être considéré comme une archive.
Born in 1881 in Bruges, from an Irish father Henry English and a Belgian mother, Marie Dinnewet. She’s the oldest sister of Joe, a painter, best known for his work as a graphic designer for ‘de frontbeweging’ the flemish emancipation movement during WW1. When he died of an appendicitis in 1918, he became one of the main symbolic heroes of the nationalist movement, a movement that still is politically pivotal in Belgium’s ever evolving state structures. It’s his story mainly that has got me into this realm of archives and history that has been driving my work.
One of the works made for Borderlines, Front Lines comprises four altered postcards. The postcards were written and sent to addresses in England between 1916 and 1918 by British soldiers on active service in France or Flanders during the First World War. On each one the correspondence section has been almost completely erased, and written over with my own text, four messages to my grandfather, who also served in these areas between 1916 and 1918.
Plato in Phaedrus pointed out the danger of easily retrievable information; in this case he was talking about reading. ‘They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.’
I first came across the technique of close engagement from textual analysis many decades ago in its application to literature. There the close enquiry revealed connections, references and meanings that were often not seen at first, and which through reference to later history or wider cultural and political context could easily not have been accessible to or perceived by the writer. Often there were complaints of ‘too much reading into’ the text, making something of it that was not there; this was countered by reference to the idea that literature was not just a set of words but the critical exploration of potentials in the meeting between what was written and the cultural experience of the reader, validating what the reader brought – reader response criticism. However, close critical textual analysis did run the risk of losing the whole in the attention to the detail, not seeing the wood for the trees.
One of the works made for Borderlines, Front Lines comprises four altered postcards. The postcards were written and sent to addresses in England between 1916 and 1918 by British soldiers on active service in France or Flanders during the First World War. On each one the correspondence section has been almost completely erased, and written over with my own text, four messages to my grandfather, who also served in these areas between 1916 and 1918.
Since March 2021 17 researchers and visual artists whose research subject is the relationship between the archive and the fictive have been collaborating in a group initiated by visual artist Claire Ducène. The project, entitled "Fictive Archive Investigations", is hybrid and collaborative, bringing together a diversity of practices, ages and backgrounds.