| SE: From the documentary to the Archive Ana de Almeida, MA From the Documentary to the Archive - Contemporary art practices of lived, transmitted and embodied experience of resistance to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship and of the Portuguese Revolutionary Process |
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?
- Teacher: Ana De Almeida