The Ruined Archive the Ruined Archive
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Books edited by Iain Chambers, Giulia Grechi, Mark Nash the ruined archive the ruined archive edited by Iain Chambers, Giulia Grechi, Mark Nash Books 11 The Ruined Archive Books The Ruined Archive edited by Iain Chambers, Giulia Grechi and Mark Nash Books 4 — the ruined archive mela books 11 – rf02 cultural memory, migrating modernities and museum practices Published by Politecnico di Milano © June 2014, The Authors This work is provided on line as open access document under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International. The work is protected by copyright and/or other applicable law. Any use of the work other than as authorized under this license or copyright law is prohibited. For additional information http:// creativecommons.org/. isbn 978-88-95194-38-7 This Book ensued from the Research Project MeLa - European Museums in an age of migrations funded within the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (SSH- 2010-5.2.2) under Grant Agreement n° 266757. Project Officer: Mr. Zoltán Krasznai mela consortium Politecnico di Milano (Coordinator), Italy – Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, Denmark – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche ITIA, Italy – University of Glasgow, United Kingdom – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain – Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, France – The Royal College of Art, United Kingdom – Newcastle University, United Kingdom – Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’ Orientale,” Italy. www.mela-project.eu english editing Mark Weir graphic design Zetalab — Milano layout Mariangela Orabona legal notice The views expressed here are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission. the ruined archive — 5 table of contents 07 Introduction 09 Voices in the Ruins Iain Chambers, Giulia Grechi, Mark Nash 27 CURATING… 29 Territory as Theme and Strategy. Geopoetics and the 8th Mercosul Biennial Fernanda Albuquerque 45 In Focus: Afghanistan Elizabeth Stanton 55 What Dust will Rise? Toward a Postcolonial Sensitive Museum Giulia Grechi 81 Illegitimate Writings. The Public Sphere and History in the Ethnographic Museum María Iñigo Clavo 97 Relocating the Remains of the Archive Michaela Quadraro 111 ...THE RUINS… 113 It Is Still Snowing Claire Pajaczkowska 127 Penny Siopis’ Three Essays on Shame. Questioning the Psychoanalytical M(a)us(ol)eum through Postcolonial Female Art Alessandra De Angelis 6 — the ruined archive 145 The Uncertainty of Display. Exhibitions In-Between Ethnography and Modernism Olga Fernández López 163 Othering: Art Ecologies and (Im)possible Repairs Celeste Ianniciello 181 Stones, Lava, Sand, Water. From the Archives of the Land to the Languages of Art Lidia Curti 213 …OF AN ARCHIVE 215 Oklahoma-Nararachi, Peyote Road Landscapes Francisco Cabanzo 241 Other Spaces/Other Selves. Museum Encounters & Foucault’s Heterotopia Jessica Fiala 263 TheNew Barbarians as Living Archives. Inci Eviner’s Artwork Mariangela Orabona 279 Powers of Secrecy (Ruins, Silences and Fogs). Some Reflections on Companionable Silences, an Exhibition Curated by Shanai Jhaveri Beatrice Ferrara 297 Quotidian Transcendence, Ephemerality and the Inertia of the Nation-State. Notes on the Work of Joar Nango Jan-Erik Lundström 307 The Liquid Museaum. Culture Hybridization on Mediterranean Shores Chiara Baravalle, Giuseppe Biscottini Introduction the ruined archive — 9 Voices in the Ruins æ iain chambers, giulia grechi, mark nash Les monuments de l’ homme ressemblent aux morceaux de son squelette ou de n’importe quel squelette, à de grands os décharnés: ils n’évoquent aucune habitation à leur taille. Francis Ponge 1997 The image on the cover of this book—Haunted House (2006) by Zineb Sedira—shows a ruined French colonial building abandoned on the Algerian coast. From the southern shore of the Mediterranean it proposes the other side of Occidental modernity: as a relic from a colonial past it continues to haunt the present. It is the fundamental argument of this book that it is such a haunting that persistently interrogates the practices and the very premises of the modern museum. In its persistence, in its refusal to disappear, another set of histories are sustained and continue to swirl around the ruin. Such histories, inscribed in the violence of the European appropriation of the rest of the planet, not only form the complex configuration of the present. They also provoke another manner of telling, a diverse narration. Such an alternative, or counter-narrative, clearly interrupts and disturbs the manner in which we are accustomed to account for time and place. Viewed and lived from elsewhere the world acquires alarming angles, time is pushed out of joint, and the presumed uniqueness of our history as a universal point of view comes undone, splinters into further tellings, rolls away from its role in securing the previous page — Museum centrality of the West. of Migration, Lampedusa (courtesy Iain Chambers The tendency to classify, collect and categorise reality, organising and 2013) institutionalising the play of identities and differences in a visual regime, 10 — the ruined archive can be seen as a prerogative of the West. For such activities are associated with the concepts of accumulation and preservation (rather than redistribution or dissolution), together with linear temporality and order which have their roots in Western culture. In this sense the construction of archives, that complex set of practices which includes collecting, accumulating, classifying, conserving and exhibiting can be identified as both “a form of Western subjectivity and a changing set of powerful institutional practices” (Clifford 1988, 218). It leads to the appropriation of other objects, images and meanings that involves “a strategy for the deployment of a possessive self, culture, and authenticity” (220). In its guise as a modern, colonial archival structure, the museum has provided the imaginative and performative resources, the cognitive scope and processes that have gone into constructing the modern European citizen. Here the citizen is duly instated as a “universal” subject, contrasted to an “otherness” against which the subject is measured via a series of founding dichotomies: other/self, nature/culture, deviant/normal. At the same time the museum is one of the elements in Foucault’s dimension of “power through knowledge,” constituting what Timothy Mitchell has called an “exhibitionary order” (Mitchell 2002). This is a fundamental of modern European identity which organizes and embraces reality in terms of a classificatory system of visual knowledge, translating and implementing it in those heterotopic expedients (Foucault 2006) whereby Europe began to organize representations of itself and diversity (the Universal Expositions, the documents of colonial administration, museums, tourism and the leisure industry, advertising, zoos, botanical gardens, theatre and the freak shows). The museum as a way of seeing, a staging, a Barnum’s circus of modern life; as a means of transmitting political values and contents; as an officially sanctioned plundering with the aim of forming new bundles of ideas; museum-ised places, like Venice; museums as ‘monuments to the fragility of cultures, the decadence of major institutions, the dwindling of rituals, the disappearance of myths, the destructive effects of wars, to negligence and corrosive doubts’ (Drugman 1995, IX, X). The museum institutionalises a manner of seeing, and more generally of perceiving: it organizes the space in which items are displayed, normalises and controls the bodies of visitors passing through that space, and constructs its referent (and indeed its visitors) through the activity of exhibiting itself. For some time now the neutrality of the museum structure, as of every form of archival structure, has been subjected to a critique starting precisely from the dual act of “exhib-action”: that complex set of practices through which the identity of an exhibited object or subject is defined by means of the modalities of its exhibition. An exhibiting is at the same time an ‘acting out,’ an action performed in the very act of representation: it is an essentially performative act that reveals the articulation of processes of power that are dissimulated, naturalised the ruined archive — 11 and rendered transparent by the alleged objectivity of the implementation (Danto 1988). In the on-going deconstruction of the museum as a non-neutral, colonial structure of representation and construction of identity and power, much emphasis has been placed on the idea that the Museum is dead, or at any rate well on the way. But before declaring the irreversible passing of the museum structure, we should reflect on the possibility of reactivating some of its social functions in a new way. This would involve constructing narratives which are able to engage with an identification process, an “imagined community” (Anderson 1983), no longer envisaged in a national or colonial sense but in a postcolonial, intercultural and trans- national manner, proposing itself as a laboratory for new modalities of citizenship—a different “coming community” (Agamben 2001). I would like a museum in the not-so-new XXI century that abandons the idea of looking for the idea of activation; one that is not a building or even a fixed space but a series of events and a program; one where the institution gives up authority; one that is dedicated to research into the practical usefulness of art; one where art entails actual social transformation,