56 Archive fever

Following a certain thread

What is an editorial?
What have I seen, what have I read, what has been said to me in the crossroads of the official archive and of the exhibition and of the cultural event, witnesses of cultural events, of technological evolutions, "witnessing consists of seeing, hearing, etc., but bearing witness is always talking, having, assuming, signing a discourse. One cannot bear witness without a discourse"*. The discourses gathered here in the form of texts, conscious that they are framed within time, politics, in what is already past when it is a trace of the present.

So, what have I read? The evocation of the body, of the fingers, of the eyes, of the reading, as a first filter. This link between the historical archive and the cultural archive that we might call an exhibition. The art object now as a document, as an archive, that is to say, as a fetishist substitute for the object and for the context of the already lost object which will never return. The inscription of any act, work, discourse in its setting, linked to other sources of wealth and empowerment. The inscription of any act, work, discourse in its setting, in its reception. The ever-crossed limits between work and job, between document, archive and art, between the position of the author and the desire of property.

Each text asks about the conditions of what the author has seen or done, because he/she is contextualised within a technical, political evolution, because he/she is contextualised in a time, in a relationship with other authors, institutions and techniques. Texts, works, testimonies, documents in situation. 

*Derrida, J. & Stiegler, B. Echographies of television, Cambridge : Polity P, 2002