“Image Control-Delete”: The destruction of the archive as a strategy of a poetic intention in Contemporary Art

Abstract

In the context of Contemporary Art, the possibility of a radical perversion of the document and, by extension of ideas, the total or partial destruction of its elements or functions, were transformed for the artist, due to substantially different circumstances (i.e.: practices, processes and creative strategies), in a deeply creative space. In the light of these ideas, this article discusses the implication of this phenomenon of "destruction" of the archive in the construction of the contemporary imaginary - the proximity of aesthetic and poetic results to the idea of a - "palimpsest" -, seeking to demonstrate how its more subversive, “anomic” and even paradoxical character has been converted, symbolically and conceptually, to the different territories of thought and artistic practice, on the one hand, in a possibility of continuous “re-inscription” of forms, meanings and senses, and, on the other hand, in the potency – “ad infinitium” – of an appropriation, experimentation and transfiguration of the real.