Use-value

Participating to the archive workshop after being in an incredibly chaotic and spectacular Biennial atmosphere gave an encouragement that I was looking for. Even if I have participated some of the workshops of acw before, this is the first one that I am coming specifically for this purpose. The easygoing yet rigorous two days made me reflect on the things that I wished to articulate as opposed to the things that are expected of me by other people. Moreover, the workshop environment reminded me of spaces/places where comparison / the urge to impress / showing off is at the background where you are more free to go back to your guts.
The project that I will be working on – however it will evolve – will get me back on reading/articulating/reflecting on the things that I stopped for a while. The contingent and undecided form of the material is also stimulating.
Pelin Uran


I think that this workshop has really created/facilitated a synergy between the actors. A lot of things have been said and thought. I must confess that I had no real or concrete expectations before coming and that now I want to do something out of all that. Even if I was asking for definitions I didn't really get or for recording I absolutly didn't get, the material is here and I think that everybody in the workshop really took his role as an opportunity to make/produce/create/keep/destroy something then. Anyway, the next step for me will be to take the time with marie to go on with these ideas of "medium-content" and "dissemination vs/= archives" in order to produce something at the end of the period. We've been great even if we didn't need to!
Etienne Bernard


Before the workshop, I made research on the UFO’s archives. We don’t know if these archives exist or not, the only thing we can do is to speculate on it, to imagine them.
The workshop helped me to develop and to understand a bit more some questions. We have talked the exhaustion, the decrease of information, constraining energy, the feeling of saturation, the absence and refusal. These issues are very important to me.
I like the idea that archives could exist without a physical existence.
Now, I wonder about immaterial archives. This is related to my practice of publishing and what I do with printed matters and publications.
I am thinking about a publication (a book for example) that would be visible only on a website. What happened to the reel object would be kept secret. This is just a beginning of something that could be a collaborative project. I very excited about working with other people.
Anna Hess


the workshop seems to have shifted the way i look at objects and documents, i'm thinking about this in terms of what has neccessitated the production or existence of all these things. also: how does the content and the materiality of these things contain time, how do they project into the past and the future. what is there besides the perpetual present? maybe after having thought about these things in the group i'll be able to read time within things more intuitively, or want to think about it more. the psychological impulses that compel the creation of archives are very interesting. why do we retain when the world is already full and the audience is unclear and the experience may be compromised and the possibility of communicating with precision is almost impossible? this is an interesting 'why.' the paradox of wanting to capture nothingness has always appealed to me but now i will also consider whether a void can be stored, or if its nothingness precludes storage.
after the workshop i feel like i'm more capable of more complex consideration in the documentation and archiving of projections.
working rigourously with a group of people who i don't know well seems like a much greater possibility than it seemed before this.
an archive may occur through power or consensus.
liv barrett


During this workshop, it seemed that a lot of people felt an exhaustion about producing archives. But why do we consider so easily the archive as a boring thing? Paradoxically the question about recording or not the workshop was always in the middle of the speech.
The archive represents so much information that we can have the feeling of exhaustion. Is it possible to find in this trace of human being a kind of Freedom?
A group of scientist discovered that if the objects of our daily life were voluntarily aged, then in particular like knowledge transmition objects, there will be nothing left because of the cheap material (paper, ink...) we use to transmit.
There's in fact a paradoxical way of producing archive as a proof of existence and producing archives which can be so easily destroyed.
I was first interested by the idea of a trash archives, because of the fact that the archive could sometimes be too heavy to keep thinking on.
But by listening to each other I became more interested by the paradoxical idea of the archive as a simulation of something which doesn’t exist and something real which is not archiving.
Christelle Faucoulanche

In this workshop I felt more able to listen to other people. The knowledge contributed by everyone about the subjects of speech and archive is very useful and has really extended my ideas around the subjects. I've been able to clarify objectives and think more about possible outcomes. Sometimes I think there is already enough material and discourses around 'archive' but what we have generated together couldn't have been generated by what I already know it had to come from the environment here together.
Jacqui Riva


An archive could be everything, it exists more in terms of thinking : what is an archive is more a process, the process to keep. And even if you try to not archive anything, it would exist. Memory is an "archive" and everything related could became an archive, for you or for somebody else.
The fantastic thing to consider is the fact that an archive is a trace of an event, of something which is passed, but somebody kept. How much is it objective? What is the part of reality?
Archive asks the question of the reality (UFO for exemple) and at the same time of the History, how could we try to give an objective sense with subjective things...
Marie Gautier


I feel much less alone in a workshop, there are parts of me I’m not usually ware until people pay attention to them. If I work alone at the computer I often feel like it’s me, more or less, against the world. When with people I trust more that situations can be transformed. Usually in workshop we hope people will ‘do’ something. This time it was squarely resisted to make traces. People often spoke for a long time without being clear about what the meant. I felt we got closer to a non phallic order where meaning were more diffuse yet somehow more connected for being so. It makes me feel hopeful that people can refuse things together. I even feel part of a tremendous surge or urge that I didn’t author or prompt. I feel less sense of defeat about sharing or what matters to me with others in the future. I know more about what happens to others apart from being able to articulate it.
Geoff Lowe


The workshop?
We have Speech. A lot.
We have Archive. But we don’t want to do it.
We have decided collectively to do not make any archive of the worshop – no video, no sound.
But after three days of working together, a map took shape, a drawing on a large white paper, a world that puts up our departure for a crusade to the question about Archives, as a plan of action, synergy.
At the beginning: a big white sheet/page.
For most of us we had never met before. We met, we listened, we learned, one wonders.
Then: on the same sheet/page are drawn continents.
All is in the place, we are here with our differences and cultures. We begin to provoke, to propose, to disturb, to give our thinking, to confront with our own verb, to share it, to exchange. In fact, we work.
Finally strokes and arrows are multiple.
The map is the representation of the exchange that we had together. All the connections we have like a beamish energy. Some words are written, thoughts, wishes.
This will be my first impression of our project, a map showing our desires. Desires to work together and to put some magic on word «archive», which doesn't sound so magical.

This workshop is like the map: a bit messy. Because we had to discuss the notion of archive, by going through all the roads of thinking, question that it requires. and debate that it imposes.
We will work together for that our rough roadmap becomes a travel. Our erasures are avalaible here.
It seems that it's a sign if we met every day on a boat…
Marie Husson

Almost every work of serious contemporary art recapitulates, on some explicit or implicit level, the historical sequence of objects to which it belongs. Consciousness of precedent has become very nearly the condition and definition of major artistic ambition. For that reason artists have become avid, if unpredictable consumers of art history. Yet the organized discipline of the history of art remains largely blind to the products of this interest and entirely sheltered from the lessons that might accrue from them.
Thomas Crow. Unwritten histories of conceptual art
In the catalogue Oehlen/Williams. Wexner Center. 1995. p86
Sébastien Pluot

Paris workshop

images here

Work charts