Cristina Baldacci – Impossible Archives: An Obsession of Contemporary Art

In the context of Enfin seules. Photographs from the Archive of Modern Conflict

The need to classify, or to bring a variety of objects back to a certain number of hierarchically ordered types in order to grasp and understand the world, accompanies those moments in history in which a crisis of knowledge is perceived with greater intensity. Even if today, in the age of total information, the renewed interest in classifying and archiving perhaps arises from the need to orient oneself in an excess of knowledge that produces disorientation.

Yet, every classification of the world is in itself arbitrary, tentative, incomplete, inclined to a perfection that cannot be reached. Confining the real in predefined categories is always an act of force, a fictitious representation, which makes appear what it is not and is affected by the choices and canons of a specific creator.

What happens when artists create new classifications and approach archives, each with different intentions and methods? In most cases, they make a transgressive – sometimes even radical – gesture to constantly re-enact, rehabilitate, renegotiate our knowledge and memory. Often revealing the relationship between power and knowledge in its many forms, or reflecting on ontological-metaphysical problems concerning our (post-human) future. As a result, artists conceive “impossible” archival projects; that is, such atypical or sometimes encyclopaedic endeavours which represent a counter-model and can only remain unfinishable. The lecture will focus on some representative archival projects by contemporary artists and photographers who have engaged with the classification of the (natural) world.

Cristina Baldacci (PhD) is a Contemporary Art Historian and (from 2018) Senior Researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where she teaches History of Photography, in relation to Visual Arts and Cultures. Her research focuses mainly on the archive as a metaphor. Baldacci is a convenor of the ‘Re-’ Interdisciplinary Network at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, and a member of the research group Global Art Archive, Universitat de Barcelona. She was a Fellow (2016–2018) and Affiliated Fellow (2018–2020) at ICI Berlin. Among her recent publications are Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory(forthcoming) and On Reenactment: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools (forthcoming), Double Trouble in Exhibiting the Contemporary: Art Fairs and Shows (2020), the co-edited issue Archive is Politics of “Routes&Roots” magazine (2020) and the co-edited volumes: Montages: Assembling as a Form and Symptom in Contemporary Arts (2018), Abstraction Matters: Contemporary Sculptors in Their Own Words (2018) and the monograph Archivi impossibili: un’ossessione dell’arte contemporanea (2016/2019).

Lectures

Contemporary art continues to attract a large adult audience, whether informed amateurs or neophytes looking for the first keys to understanding artworks that are difficult to access. Meetings with artists, art historians and experts in the world of contemporary art are special moments and these direct exchanges are rich in lessons and therefore particularly sought after.