Archive Cultures: a project that is up and running. Jorge Blasco Gallardo

Archive Cultures began at the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Autumn 2000. As an exhibition format and set up, it forms part of a historiographic tendency in which many of the systems that organise pictures and texts share a common genealogy, and in which the theatres and palaces that commemorate the renaissance, the displays of curios, the first scientific exhibitions, the first photography shows, propaganda exhibitions and the more recent representations of the Holocaust (or other tragedies connected with repression) constantly cross the line that exists between archive and exhibition. However, its starting point lies, not so much in this genealogy, but in the way that 20th century artists and narrators have intervened in the archive and in the light that their work has shed on a way of containing information, constructing memory and arranging reality that has undoubtedly marked, and continues to mark, our entire cultural and social environment.