Lexicon for an Affective Archive - Softcover

Palladini, Giulia; Pustianaz, Marco

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783207787 ISBN 13: 9781783207787

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2017

Synopsis

To study an archive or archival materials is to encounter an affective and critical practice involved in the construction of memory. Lexicon for an Affective Archive, edited by Giulia Palladini and Marco Pustianaz, is an international collection of these encounters, offering glimpses into the intimate relations inherent in finding, remembering (or imagining) and creating an archive. Bringing together voices from a variety of fields across the humanities, performance studies and contemporary art, and engaging in a multidisciplinary analysis, this beautifully designed and fully illustrated volume advances the idea of an “affective archive” as a useful conceptual tool – a tool which contributes to an understanding of an expanded notion of an archive and its central role in contemporary visual and performing arts.

A co-publication with NInA and Live Art Development Agency.

About this title

About the Author

Giulia Palladini is an independent researcher and guest professor at Kunsthochschule Weissensee, Berlin.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Lexicon For An Affective Archive

By Giulia Palladini, Marco Pustianaz

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2017 Polish Audiovisual Institute / Narodowy Instytut Audiowizualny (NInA)
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-778-7

Contents

Katarzyna Tórz FOREWORD, 8, 
Giulia Palladini and Marco Pustianaz, 10, 
LEXICON FOR AN AFFECTIVE ARCHIVE, 
Alessandra Violi BOXES, 21, 
Katerina Šedá VNUCKA, 27, 
Dorota Krakowska KRES, 35, 
Rabih Mroué WARNING, 41, 
Claudia Castellucci ORDIGNO, 53, 
Franz Anton Cramer BEWEGUNG, 59, 
Elisabeth Lebovici SIDA, 65, 
Bettina Knaup RECOMBINATIONS, 71, 
Erik Göngrich EINMACHGLAS, 77, 
Zdenka Badovinac CARDBOARD BOX, 83, 
Annemarie Matzke / She She Pop SCHUBLADEN, 89, 
Tim Etchells INDEX CARDS, 95, 
Paul Clarke STEWARD, 103, 
Malgorzata Szczesniak BIEL, 113, 
Malgorzata Dziewulska DRZAZGI, 123, 
Graeme Miller IMMEMORIAL, 131, 
Heidi & Rolf Abderhalden / Mapa Teatro TESTIGOS, 137, 
canecapovolto & Elisa Abela CONDOMINIO, 143, 
Paola Di Cori VOLVER, 149, 
Joe Kelleher UNANSWERED, 155, 
Tina Campt STASIS, 161, 
Alina Marazzi SPECCHIO, 167, 
Paolo Vignolo TUMBAS, 173, 
Ann Cvetkovich EPHEMERA, 179, 
Ida & Henry Wilde (Keren Ida Nathan & Antonia Baehr) GLOSS, 185, 
APPENDIX, 191, 

CHAPTER 1

Alessandra Violi

BOXES

After you died, your photographs and other bits of your past life — pictures of your dad and mum, your mother's will written by hand on a skin-like piece of paper, scraps of an old advert for Siderexport showing dad smiling among his colleagues, a hair clip made to look like an improbable flower — all ended up in a box.

It's funny how we all become curators when dealing with the belongings of our ghosts, literally taking care of their objects by enclosing them in a case or a casket, the box as a safe that is meant to preserve what is precious, the unnumbered lots of our private archive. Come to think of it, though, this boxing is as mortifying as storing items in those filing cartons used for public archiving: the box can be a coffin from which no retrieval is expected; lifeless things may lie there in waiting, but their concealment is, in fact, an intimation of their disappearance, of their social and affective death.

I now realize that this is probably why I treated your coffin as if it were a box of a different kind. One of those Cornellian boxes full of toy-like objects and flotsam, faded photographs, marbles, pins, grains of sand and other trivia, all gathered there to perform some secret task. Joseph Cornell imagined them as the homes of ballerinas, opera singers and movie actresses, female performers who would replay the contents of his boxes in endless combinations through their bodies: dancing, acting, fading like the human voice; a deathly box turned into a living stage and a theatre-box for us, the absent witnesses of their performances. I have often written about Cornell's boxes in my academic work, understanding (through the lens of Walter Benjamin) that his queer cases full of ticky-tacky were themselves archives of another sort — the box creating a third, intermediate space where material things stopped being dead relics of the world outside or tokens of the affective world inside, but rather cross-indexed each other to perform new constellations and surprising conversations. An entry in Cornell's diary thus wondered what the objects randomly integrated in his boxes "would have to say to each other," reinventing the box as an archive of virtualities, a Pandora's box generating potentialities.

As your box had to be closed and sealed off, what I had studied for my job percolated through my nerves and became simply an affective impulse acted out by the body (my gesture was indeed secretive, as if unconsciously aware of transgressing some conventional — if not sacred — function of the wooden coffer): I slipped, next to your unresponsive face, a senseless piece of ribbon and an old photo of you and dad, one of those tacky holiday souvenirs where the sun shines so shamelessly that the light looks unreal. Admirers of Joseph Cornell claim that his boxes are best appreciated by putting them on the floor and lying next to them. His boxes invite you to play dead — Cornell got his idea of boxing things from Houdini, the famous escape artist who could flee the encasement of death — or to stop being straight and be nothing but an affected body, whether in rest or sleep, intimacy or disease — Cornell got his idea of boxing things from the miniature toys he made for his brother Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy. Perhaps my nesting of an archive within another was an exchange of gifts, as I can't really tell now whether the box was meant for you, filling it with things you could replay with while lying, or for me, staging your death in my memory as a theatre of endless performances and affective animations.

Then other boxes came. Those into which I had to pack all my belongings for moving out, choosing to go back to the house where I had grown up and where you had lived until the end. Against the advice of some of my friends not to take residence in a mausoleum, afraid that I would turn myself into a document of our shared past, I felt that "home" could be re-enacted differently, its repository of gestures and rituals fleshed out as new events. The living box of the body against dead repetition in the "little box" of our house.

* * *

"Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky. Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same. There's a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one. And they're all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same."

* * *

Around the year that I was born, Malvina Reynolds sang about people being serialized in "little boxes," homes and workplaces packaging life stories into the same imitation game. So, the word "ticky-tacky," which she invented for the purpose, is about my age, an item of a musical archive that I can now play differently. You can't imagine the amount of ticky-tacky I had to sort out while moving here, boxing in and boxing out heaps of trivia and memorabilia, fingering each of them: grandmother's old-fashioned lace gloves, stray pieces of cloth ("what the hell …?"), a diary from the time of World War II by a grandfather I never knew, buttons, my first sketchbook that you had religiously kept in a drawer. My archive, your archive, and at each turn around the home-box that my body knew by heart a strange feeling of deja-vu, but made new, enacting a different story. The making of an archive is in the pulse between keep and throw, but Cornell gave me a knack for the discarded: ping-pong balls, hair pins, feathers … he stored them away in 57 cartons that now make up the artist's archive at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He never meant them as collectibles, though. The point was to give them new homes, out of the archive-box into his art boxes, what he called "toys" for affective games with the past, recounting a history that never was except in the imagination of the player.

That's how I have learnt that boxes are not for storing the belongings of ghosts, but for ghosting time: like your old hatbox that now contains your archive, my affective processes are neither of the past nor of the present. They hover out of (the archive's) order, inhabiting a space of transition just like this letter, left in this post-box for no future collection.

CHAPTER 2

Katerina Šedá

VNUCKA

GRANDDAUGHTER

Once upon a time

When I was little, neither of my grandmothers ever played with me. Birthdays or Christmas get-togethers were the only occasions we would see each other regularly. Strangely enough, as a child I didn't mind it so much, but later I realized that I didn't know either of my grandmothers too well. I never felt like forcing the issue, so in time I just got used to things. Then, in 2005, a turning point came and things started to change.

My grandmother Jana (1939–2007) decided that after retiring she would put an end to all her activities and from one day to the next she stopped doing anything at all. At first, I told myself the main reason for her resignation must have been my grandfather's death, but she disabused me of that notion: "At last I don't have to cook anymore!" Of course, his death affected her, but, at the same time, it gave her the pretext to do nothing whatsoever. She would only get up out of bed to eat lunch, which my mother would prepare for her; she stopped doing housework, cooking, and shopping. Her favourite household member became the TV, which she was capable of watching non-stop all week. It doesn't matter was the phrase she'd use most often in answer to most of our questions. So, even though she was healthy and able to fend for herself, we were forced to do absolutely everything for her, including making decisions.

That was what led me to try and engage her in activities that might open up topics of conversation for us. From the very first, I ruled out all household chores, as they represented a kind of punishment for her. I noticed that she tended to live in the past rather than in the present, so that's where I zeroed in. One of the few things she kept returning to was the 33 years she'd been in charge of tool stocks in a store that sold household goods in Brno (1950–1983). She still remembered over 650 items, including their prices. On that basis, it occurred to me to try and reconstruct the store, on paper at least, and get her back to work. The different items she started to draw at my bidding became the main subject of conversation for our entire family.

Eventually, I added other activities to the drawing so my grandmother would stay motivated throughout the day. First thing in the morning, we'd do What's it for?, an exercise in which I'd ask her what all sorts of things were for and she'd answer on paper. At first, I didn't place too much importance on this "warm-up," but in time it turned out to perfectly illustrate my grandmother's view of the world and her way of thinking. The slightest thing would have some significance or purpose, but she herself was, in her own words, GOOD FOR NOTHING. Every city in the world was for living in, but all that Brno, where we live, was good for was producing tractors. Each day before lunch I'd do 1× daily before meals, an exercise in which I'd give my grandmother a questionnaire to fill in before we ate. It was a way of leading into a conversation over lunch, but at first it didn't work at all. She'd just fill in the questionnaire and then start reading. After a while, I realized my grandmother would only talk when one of the questions didn't make sense. So I started filling the questionnaires with nonsensical questions like "If your dog wore clothing, how would you dress him?" Over two years I got to ask her several thousand questions and was at least able to get to know her a bit better that way.

Whereas my grandmother Jana and I really got quite close in the course of our activities, my grandmother Milada (1935–) remained as distant as she'd ever been. Paradoxically, her problem was quite the opposite — she'd never ever take a rest. When she retired she seemed to become even more active than before — she'd regularly go to work in the garden with my grandfather Milo and would always say the two of them were self-sufficient. When he died in 2006, my grandmother bravely went on "functioning" as before. I always admired her for that and my admiration distracted me from the fact that thanks to her bustling activity I'd never really got to know her.

In 2009, my daughter Julie was born and within four weeks my husband had left us. I fell into a funk, but my family quickly pulled me out of it. My parents helped me, and sometimes my grandmother Milada would come and take care of little Julie. Once I noticed she was trying to recount a convoluted classical fairy tale and I asked her to tell her about her own life instead. She looked at me, surprised: "My own life? Nothing's happened in my life! I've had a completely normal life." Then it occurred to me that she might write a children's book for Julie about her life and thereby bridge the gap that separated us.

At first, my grandmother didn't want to — she doesn't like writing or drawing. She said she'd rather be ploughing a field. Yet, she eventually set about writing and drawing anyhow, and her text surprised us all. She divided the resulting book, titled Normal Life, into five basic chapters ("Not Much of a Childhood," "I Got Married," "We Had a Good Life," "We Were Creating a New Society," and "Life's Halfway Point"), which captured the important moments of her life. She devoted the greatest details to her childhood, during which she had to work a lot, so she was actually glad when it was over. Most of her personal life took place in communist Czechoslovakia and in her words, "Things were better then." She described the certainties of the time and made a comparison with life today through both writing and illustrations.

After the revolution in 1989, a lot of things changed here. The government changed and the regime changed to this so-called capitalism we have now. Interpersonal relationships also changed. People were now able to travel abroad, like they'd always wanted to before the revolution but many of them couldn't afford to anyhow. We've got democracy here, but many people interpret it in whatever way suits them; they think they can do whatever they want, but often that's not the case (you have to respect law and order). Today it's all mainly about money and property because our economy has basically collapsed. People don't have jobs and so they don't have money for housing and often for culture either. People have stopped going to the movies and the theatre because they're beyond their means. Money comes first. A lot of families are living in debt they can't pay back and so they end up having their property and often even their houses seized. Since 1989 there have been a lot of homeless people and beggars here. There's a lot of stealing going on. Drugs and murder have also become rampant. Our moral fibre has weakened significantly; every second marriage ends in divorce and few children are born — people are afraid they won't be able to support them. You also see a surge in diseases you didn't see before (tuberculosis, among others) — that's also due to migrations of people coming here for work and a better life. Agriculture is also doing really poorly. Land has been returned to the original owners, but they aren't able to work it so a lot of fields are left uncultivated and we end up importing a lot of foods that are of a lower quality than if we'd grown them ourselves. In the past our agriculture was heavily state-subsidized, but today there's no money for that anymore. Also, not much housing is being built and what is being built is relatively expensive. Many houses have been returned to the original owners who then impose rents people can't afford (mainly the elderly and families with small children). There are all sorts of goods in stores, mainly imported, but they're often so overpriced that a lot of people can't afford them. Almost everything is imported — clothing, consumer goods (from electronics to cars) and food, which is often of poor quality — whereas local vegetables, fruits and other foods are looked down upon and thrown away. In 1989, people occupied the squares to jingle their keys and expected the world to be upended. A lot of them didn't even know why they were there. A lot of things have gone downhill since then.

That's how my grandmother describes her view of history, which is in sharp contrast to what children can read in textbooks today. However, her story is typical of the accounts of numerous Czech grandmothers who are still telling their stories behind the closed doors of their homes.

CHAPTER 3

Dorota Krakowska

KRES

LIMIT

The year is 1967. I'm on vacation with my family in Niedzica. A woman who always asked questions of all sorts during meals tells me about my future, in which she envisions a husband, children, and a family. I'm twelve years old and I don't know yet the story of World War II nor the enormity of the death brought upon Polish and non-Polish Jews by the Holocaust, but I reply, "I'm never going to get married, because the one destined to be with me was never born. His would-be parents disappeared with the smoke from the crematorium furnaces." I clearly remember this conversation from so many years ago because I was horrified by my words as soon as I had uttered them. My memory is irrational, as it is tied to a world and people whom I could not possibly remember. It reaches back to an imagined, idealized world. This archive cannot be reorganized because the non-existent world that it documents also resists rearrangement. As do the deceased people who belonged to it, whom I have never met, and whose presence I feel nevertheless.

What tools are available to a person who cannot articulate her experiences because they persist in the realm of imagination and intuition more strongly than they do as real, tangible experiences? How do I live with the painful absence of non-existent yet close strangers, with an uncalled-for "archive" that is nevertheless installed in my memory, an archive that continually manifests itself in my emotions, my body, and my personal relationship with the space in which I live and work? What do I do with this archive when I lack the tools to transform this imagined catalogue into a real entity and free myself of it? Can I wrest myself away from this dybbuk? With no faith or outside support?

For as long as I can remember, I have lived with a sense of belonging to the world of central Europe, where Christians and Jews were together. The place inhabited by this other community — unknown, yet still present — is my imagination. As far back as my memory goes, I have missed them: the people who left before I even had the chance to meet them, and the people who were never born. For years this memory of a life that was not my own remained hidden within me, undisclosed to others, as if it were somehow shameful.

Despite numerous attempts and my desire to do so, I have never found in modern-day Poland or modern-day Israel anything that I could consider an extension of that world; nothing that would allow me to say goodbye and to close this painful part of my life. Perhaps only once during the several months I spent conducting research for the exhibition Once We Were, devoted to the topic of Tarnow Jews, did I have the feeling of "being close," if only for a few hours. I was having dinner with a group of young Israelis in Jaffa one evening. I felt as if we were in pre-World War II Warsaw. The houses surrounding us blurred together; we sat in silence as if thinking back to a time that we had all lost forever. Someone asked, "Where are you from?" "I'm from Poland," I replied. "You're not the only one," a young girl added. "We're all from Poland." That was the only time I have ever returned to that lost reality, to that world that will neither be replaced nor recreated by any museums.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Lexicon For An Affective Archive by Giulia Palladini, Marco Pustianaz. Copyright © 2017 Polish Audiovisual Institute / Narodowy Instytut Audiowizualny (NInA). Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783207787
• ISBN 13: 9781783207787
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 212