56 Archive fever

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Common sounds. Xabier Erkizia

“This is what is unique and exceptional about music: transmitting and interpreting it form a single act. A book or a picture can be kept in a library or in a museum after they have been interpreted, but this is another quite autonomous act that has nothing to do with merely conserving it. Music is not like this. Music is sound and exists in the moment that it is played, and in the moment that it is played you cannot avoid interpreting it.”

Alessandro Baricco
Hegel’s Soul and the Cows of Wisconsin

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Erkizia_eng.pdf — PDF document, 81Kb

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I mark the minute. Azucena Vieites

In a recent interview the members of a group were asked what it was that inspired them to play other people’s songs. They answered, “We normally take songs we like, ones we can give our own angle to”. In the same magazine, a London-based designer remarked that music was very important to her work: “Each style of music is an aesthetic, a mood”.

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Veietes_eng.pdf — PDF document, 74Kb

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Archive Cultures: a project that is up and running. Jorge Blasco Gallardo

Archive Cultures began at the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Autumn 2000. As an exhibition format and set up, it forms part of a historiographic tendency in which many of the systems that organise pictures and texts share a common genealogy, and in which the theatres and palaces that commemorate the renaissance, the displays of curios, the first scientific exhibitions, the first photography shows, propaganda exhibitions and the more recent representations of the Holocaust (or other tragedies connected with repression) constantly cross the line that exists between archive and exhibition. However, its starting point lies, not so much in this genealogy, but in the way that 20th century artists and narrators have intervened in the archive and in the light that their work has shed on a way of containing information, constructing memory and arranging reality that has undoubtedly marked, and continues to mark, our entire cultural and social environment.

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Blasco_eng.pdf — PDF document, 90Kb

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Incurable Ill. Miren Jaio

archive n 1 a compilation of documents recording events that have already taken place 2 an innate element of great tales, aspires to totality and universality, although its nature is incomplete and partial 3 creates breaks in the habitual perception of existence as a continuous unbroken whole 4 it is functional in character: the archive of the past is used to attempt to make sense of the present and the future 5 almost nothing remains outside it and it is omnipresent in the collective imaginarium. Interestingly, an “imaginarium” is also a type of archive.

There are many possible definitions associated with the term “archive”. We will now try to analyse the reasons for “archive sickness” through an analysis of three definitions of the term.

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Jaio_eng.pdf — PDF document, 98Kb

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Paper and Pixel, the mutation of publishing. Alessandro Ludovico

The death of paper didn’t happen

At the beginning of the 20th Century, the death of paper was predicted.

It was foreseen just after the advent of public electricity networks and the consequent spreading of new revolutionary media, like the radio and the telegraph. The innovation impetus induced the hypothesis that the electrical transmission of the voice would have ended the printed distribution of information, replacing magazines and books with the faster voice that was transmitted over cables. The future seemed to be with wires everywhere, which would have spread the content of libraries to every home or in public spaces through some sort of broadcasting kiosks provided with primitive headphones.

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LUDOVICO_eng.pdf — PDF document, 67Kb

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The Enthusiastic Archive. Leire Vergara

Jacques Derrida, in a lecture entitled, The concept of the Archive: a Freudian impression, delivered in London in 1994 as part of the international symposium Memory: The Question of Archives, spoke of the archive as a structural fault related to the exercise of memory, on the basis that the spur of death in itself represents the threat and the motor that moves desire through the register of reality. When the lecture was published, Derrida decided to change the title to Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression1.

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Vergara_eng.pdf — PDF document, 130Kb

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Imagining a world without copyright. Joost Smiers, Marieke van Schijndel

Copyright once was a means to guarantee artists of a decent income. Apart from the question as to whether it actually functioned as such —most of them never made a penny from and still don’t owe a penny to the system— we have to admit that copyright serves an altogether different purpose in the contemporary world. It now is the tool of conglomerates in the music, publishing, imaging, and movie industries to control their markets.

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smiers_eng.pdf — PDF document, 80Kb

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When Copyright appears in the library. Ramón Salaberria

Public assets (the case of public libraries) are currently under intense enemy fire. Under the banner of copyright, regulations are being drawn up that, for example, practically abolish the right to make copies for personal use or, as far as libraries are concerned, for keeping digital documents. This article deal with another highly symbolic regulation that aims to ensure that libraries pay a sum for the documents that they lend out.

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Salaberria_eng.pdf — PDF document, 69Kb

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Collective art memory. Cecilia Andersson

51. Venice Biennial June-October 2005

Constant comparisons come up between the unbearable temperatures of two years ago and this year’s milder climate, between current use of space and ways of installing the pavilions, between budgets, entertainment, selected artists and between one lavish party and the other. But without comparison stands the fact that this year two Spanish women, María de Corral and Rosa Martínez, curated the two major exhibitions.

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Andersson_eng.pdf — PDF document, 61Kb