Digitizing Ideas / beta

Laurence Rassel, April 20th at 1 pm, NO Galerija

Can we digitize and publish on line the content of our historical and future archives?

The complex case of museums and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies.

Mainly, modern and contemporary art centres are working with artists,authors who have in their majority made certain choices to protect or to hand over their work to producers, broadcasters, collecting rights This fact limits enormously how an institution can share the content of its archive with the public. Nevertheless, looking at the exceptions to copyrights and the possible uses of free licenses we can explore interesting possibilities. This intervention will look briefly at the legal issues raised by the digitization and online publication of the historical archives of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies. We are in the process of creating a virtual space that facilitates the re-appropriation, the comment, the study and the active participation on our archive. In this framework, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies developed, together with a team of lawyers, a protocol for labeling works with legal information (rights management information) that automates the organization of the digitized documents according to their legal category, that analyzes the tricky legal issues when applied to a diversity of works and suggests ways to make the documents available for reading and re-use.

Laurence Rassel is Director of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona.

Luiza Nader April 23rd - April 25th, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciencies Library

Archive fever

The lecture and 2 seminars will be dedicated to the issue of archivisation (and historicization), its great (indeed burning) historical need and political constraints such as a.o. nostalgic search for origins and desire to find unconditioned truth in archival stores. Especially the archives in Central Europe tend to be not only an object of advanced historical and cultural studies, but also a space of dreams, uncounscious desires and transference. The aim of our encounter is to reflect on the growing body of the archival theories (a.o. J. Derrida, C. Steedman, A. Farge, P. Nora) and to engage it into critical practice of investigation of historical archives in the field of art. I will examine both selected artistic archives and specific archival practices (formostly from Poland) which could be simultaneously seen as works of art and works of history producing and translocating our knowledge on the recent past. How events and experiences are being included/excluded in the historical narration with the help of the archive? What is the role of representation? Which pasts and futures are we eager to historize and remember and which are relegated to the space of oblivion and historical eclipse? What is the relation between the archive and memory; archive and affect; between archivising, remembering, forgetting and excluding? How affect is intertwined with the logic, structure and practice of the archive?

The two seminars will be dedicated to the specific Polish archives, idea of historical exclusion/inclusion, vulnerability of memory, modernism and the power of affect.

- First seminar “Archive and memory” would be a reflexive analysis of process of archivisation within the Foksal gallery, Warsaw based institution, center of avantgarde practices in the 60. and 70. from the point of view of memory discourse.
- Second seminar “Archive and affect” will be an examination of excluded pasts from Polish version of modernism and process of regaining the future taking as a starting point the archive of Polish artist Zofia Kulik and her recent archival practices.