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.
Pretending that something really exists or existed is a fundamental aspect of the creativeact. Whether with words, images or documents, the artist tells a story. The viewer or reader ‘voluntarily suspends his or her disbelief’. This is what the English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) called in 1817 the « Willing suspension of disbelief » or « poetic faith ». A writer uses words to refer to facts that may or may not have actually happened and puts them into a narrative. In doing so, he creates a unique story. The visual artist might use objects and subvert them, in order to create something new. It is therefore not surprising to find that artists from all areas use archival documents and manipulate them, or that they create fictitious archival documents.
This is not a new phenomenon. In the middle of the 19th century, just to take an example, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1949) quoted fictitious extracts from newspapers (although partly based on real facts) to elaborate his Parisian detective stories, Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) and The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842). In general, fictional archives are regularly used in literature and film to make the story that is told believable and thus to suspend disbelief in the reader’s or viewer’s mind. More recent examples are Mark Frost’s novel The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016), consisting of letters, newspaper clippings and other documents collected by a fictional archivist, or the fictional book about the possibility of time travel, Eine Reise durch die Zeit, written by the character H.G. Tannhaus in the German Netflix-series Dark (2017-2020).
Here is the full text of Poe’s The Mystery of Marie Roget. The narrator gives translations from a fictional French newspaper article from paragraph 159 onwards: Here
Further Reading: S. T. Colerdige, Biographia Literaria, 1817, chapter XIV. Online: Here
By Philippe Black