Buried the Archives. The Entropic Landscape of Preservation in Time Capsule, Kassel (2012) of Akram Zaatari
Abstract
In the project Time Capsule, Kassel (2012) by the Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari, the symbolic gesture of burying the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) underground—this archival architecture of photographic images—, invite us to critically reflect on the function of the artistic institution and its discourse, on the scientific value of the archive and the limits of its visual preservation. We will analyse the way in which Zaatari reactivates archaeological gestures in the artistic field in order to explore the displacement of collected objects across different contexts and to reinterpret the concepts of «collection» and institutional «preservation» in times of crisis. In this geological archive where the need for blindness is claimed, is posterity the condition for seeing what is inaccessible to vision in the present? In other words: perhaps it is precisely this impossibility of seeing, the current blindness itself, which ultimately harbors the possibility of a future rebirth, where the archive, unearthed, can be re-imagined in the richness of its multiple meanings.
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