How does she do it? Presenting what in the first instance might be called long-dead and defunct archive, but imbuing it with life, interest, amazement while at the same time keep ing a stayed distance, an immobilization behind glass and screen, a moment frozen in time come alive for a bit, or even just a fleeting moment, hardly discernable…
Shadow Archive - les archives des ombres - straddles the formidable distance between museum of contemporary art and Mundianeum - something of a curiosity in the universal order of things… or rather the chaos of life, attempting to order the impossible with a positive conviction we hardly understand nowadays… A utopian challenge to our current cynicism, a breath of musty air from a time when peace and prosperity for all humans seemed possible… a time when there was still amazement at the wonders of the world…
perhaps with this exhibition one can rekindle the notion that not all is lost: that artists at least, still entertain these feeling of discovery, of conviction that there is something good to be found behind the piles of investigative papers and reels of footage, reams of cartography and all sorts of recording devices, albeit digital by now… that there is a point of view to be defended, even if old, antique or just plain out of style - and these multiple views form a personality, an attitude, an understanding.
She goes back further than the specific history of Paul Otlet and the Universal Decimal Classification system, - in fact she augments with a more subjective layer in which the defunct remanants become alive: imagination, conjecture, projection, all elements of the original, to be consulted in perfectly arranges traditional viewing cases, aligned systematically as Otlet would have appreciated, but ended-up with video presenting impossible views, simultaneous synthetic subjective… Other projects, all revolving around collections, memories and the attempt to fixate fleeting times, with the ‘circular ruins’ turning us in circles of Jose Luis Borge’s story amid connecting and knotted ropes, strings to wander through…
The two-tome approach to the catalogue is also very apt: the distinction and conversation between two approaches, with references to other works and more specific detail on some aspects dealt with, makes for interesting and agreeable reading: the otherwise dry matter of systematic classification right up to the utopian fantasy of a universal city, which as it happens was planned ‘right down our alley’ making Antwerp the centre of attention (which I’m sure would have chuffed enormously) - included even an open letter to the habitants of said city…
The exhibition at MAC’s being well worth while, the second leg is a bit of a disappointment: the Mundianeum has been over-renovated, as is often the case when authorities finally decide that something is worthwhile… Obviously there was a lot of money spent, with underground archive an ample facilities out back, but the spirit of the old musty remnant of a once great archival project has been reduced to a tid-bit funfair with lots of video and info-panels, coffee-corner and the obligatory shop taking up a large chunk of the space: as do entrance hall and ticket counter… a typical example of the “Walibification” of institutions everywhere: they have to become entertainment venues..
Luckily we have Fiona tans wonderful synthetic version of what the Mundianemu could have once been: a huge depository of knowledge built along the lines of a Panopticum, with by now dusty and forgotten reading & writing desks, lamps askew, chairs overturned… a future vision of the past, the now already being past, exept perhaps in the mind’s eye.
