Kursinformation

Documentative processes have been used both as a starting and reflection point and as a media in contemporary art, given the large number of artists using documentary and factual materials for the formulation of very different proposals. Documental practice in contemporary art has developed across several kinds of media, not always sharing a formal style or a common conceptual approach, therefore not making it possible to call it a “genre” in itself. If documentative artistic practices do not necessarily address the archive or a concept of archivology, the archive, nevertheless, in its external and hypomnesic dimension deals with a substrate that is often considered to be documental.
Different artistic proposals raise new questions when crossed with theoretical contributes about the documental, the archive and processes of archivization. In this seminar we will analyse contemporary art works - in close relation to texts from the fields of art theory, history and philosophy - which work with archive and/or documental techniques in direct connection with the historical experiences of the resistance to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship and of the Portuguese Carnation Revolution. A notion of activation or re-activation of the archive is transversal to the chosen theoretical and practical proposals, being that they aim not only at tracing the socio-political and cultural contingencies behind archives’ origins, but also at mapping the realm of the possibilities opened by its emancipatory potentials.

The analysis of different artistic practices fed by two distinct but yet equitable historical experiences raises another question of what is the relevance of form in works in which political potential is affirmed? Which new ways of articulation between the poetic and the political re-activate historical and concrete patterns of, for example, collectivism and communism in contemporary transformative processes? In many works we are presented with different strategies to rescue forms as archive of the past societal emancipatory potential, in order to empower them again from a post-revolutionary perspective. This idea of rescuing, or retrieving something from the archive results in the mapping of a pre-existent field of enunciations, the question is how do we trigger, from this process of assimilation of the past, a projection into the future through its activation in the present time?