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Interview with Laurence Rassel, 3DEC2020
FORMAL ASPECTS
Laurence talks about her experience in Barcelona, where all the projects she was working on are dead in the meantime. The initial strategy to keep them safe by embedding them in institutional frameworks such as university and Fondacio turned out not to work. After she had left, nobody felt responsible to maintain the projects. Institutional involvement does not assure responsibility!
→ first advice
Make something you can copy and spread it as wide as possible.
Coco:
Thinking of TWO different outcomes:
a selection of physical objects that can be stored in boxes or tshe like, incl. Hard drive with digitized material
digital archive/platform, preferably wiki
The objects can be handed over to d_archive, the wiki can live on many different places, including d_archive.
What is an archive, for me?
What is produced, leftover, the existence of OBN produced an archive. Invoices, emails, etc.
First of all, an archive consists of objects that then get catalogued.
ORGANIZATION
Situated Archive
= does not pretend to be exhaustive and all-encompassing; understands its limitations, personal perspective, bias.
my motivation/aim is a different one:
– opportunity to create something meaningful for myself, not leave it to others,
or make sure it will be done at all.
– use it as a tool to better understanding the workings and dynamics of the network
How to approach a collective organization? Ask the others to contribute? Organize the archive as joint archive or distributed archive?
Question: How to involve the others? How to select a few closer collaborations out of the 180 people?
→ Create the possibility for others to contribute material
How to contribute (method):
Open a box that people can fill (physically or online). What I build is the framework, the rules, the contract.
for two reasons: 1) it can't be my job to aim for building a comprehensive archive myself. This is not a scientific institutional project but an artistic research project, we do not have sufficient resources.
→ Idea: open call for contributions to the archive.
→ Involve others through interviews
Questions:
Who will be interviewed? How will the decision be made? (make transparent decision-making process, criteria, thinking & feeling)
Who will conduct the interviews? (myself? Somebody else?)
(interviews can be very manipulative. Think carefully about setting and questions; interview method)
Laurence used archiving as a way to explore how the institution works… access to how it works in terms of budget, technique, tool of analysis of an institution, to question the institution from inside.
For me not the main concern is rather making available work and spirit of the time (preservation partly, access to deeper levels than what was officially communicated; learning from obn; using material that was not published, but what was going on behind the scenes.) For me, this also includes published material as it is not taken care of elsewhere.
Laurence: archiving process is to know where you come from, what the conditions of the time were; also consider the historical situation.
PROCESS:
→ study the taxonomy of documenta_a.
How can our material be transformed to fit the taxonomy of the archive? It must do so in order to become searchable/findable data.
Possibly, think about extending the existing taxonomy, how?
→ explore other archives and their taxonomies for inspiration (Anja? Student project?)
documenta archive: include something that is not planned to be included (yet)
Think of digitizing all data carriers (CD, DVD, tapes etc.)
Archiving is a technology that can be explored and changed!
RESEARCH:
Think of a number of key words, tags
GOAL:
Transform the form of obn to the archive!
Explore obn, its paradoxes of trying to remain opaque while setting up precise rules in terms of representation etc.
How to keep these paradoxes and malleability alive in the archive?
ADVICE:
→ Produce something that you can copy and take away with you!