Archives of the commons

Exhibition view. Daniel G. Andújar. Operating System, 2015
Exhibition view. Daniel G. Andújar. Operating System, 2015

In this seminar, Fundación de los Comunes, Red de Conceptualismos del Sur and Museo Reina Sofía put forward a reflection on issues of social, cultural and political memory through the work of archives that guard, transmit and produce public memory generated by the current forms of social action conservation, which also shuts out major parts of collective experience from dominant discourse.

In this seminar, Fundación de los Comunes, Red de Conceptualismos del Sur and Museo Reina Sofía put forward a reflection on issues of social, cultural and political memory through the work of archives that guard, transmit and produce public memory generated by the current forms of social action conservation, which also shuts out major parts of collective experience from dominant discourse. This line of research into the archive and memory of subordinate and dominant groups sets forth a powerful line of reflection on new political rights and the new characteristics of a genuinely democratic sphere that is currently traversed by a multifactorial sense of crisis with far-reaching effects on the types of collective behaviour in our societies.

Archives of the commons shines a spotlight on these debates and lines of work in an international seminar organised into tables for discussion and public presentations. It is structured around three core principles of reflection: the archive models and institutional forms that make it possible, laying out a broad cartography of repository initiatives created between the 1970s and the present day; the economies of archive and the methods and protocols that ensure its dissemination and sustainability; the possible techno-political tools for undertaking its organisation, conceived as instruments that guarantee exposure, dynamic taxonomies and universal access, an indispensable condition of common archives. Therefore, the seminar will address institutional, technological and economic models that promote the different archives brought together, transversally debating these divergent records of experience and thought via the synthesis of the local and international, the individual and the collective.

With support from the Foundation for Arts Initiatives (FfAI)

Dates: December 11 - 12, 2015

Organization: Museo Reina Sofía y Fundación de los Comunes

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