Misma bolsa. Archivar en las salas de arte nuestros problemas contemporáneos

Abstract

What do we think when we classify a piece of art as archivist? The archivist genre has been a subject of continuous revision since the 1990s. Based on factors such as the link we have with history thanks to critical historiography, the democratization of information after Internet, or the growing empowerment of silenced minorities, the critics of the last fifty years, have studied the archive as a booming genre. Formal characteristics that this mode of production introduced in the visual arts have been detailed, such as legal-administrative aesthetics, the interaction of the public in the gallery with the documents, and the high ammount of elements that conform an exhibition. Everything seems to indicate that an archivist work of art can be identified with the naked eye. However, the immaterial characteristics of the gender have not been studied with equal intensity. Among those, we find its obsession with hard data, the anecdotism with which the issues are presented, or its exercise of power in relation to the territories that are present through documentation. These aspects are displayed in this article with the aim of thinking that archive has exceeded the limits of the identifiable genre with a particular formal aesthetic, to transform the way in which contemporary works especially discursive present their stories. Thus, through an analysis of installations, performances, or sculptures that evoke current situations in Latin America and other off-center geographies, it will be shown that archivist features are present even in experiences that formally seem distant to this genre.