[ESP]

︎PIPA!

ANARCHIVO

[Anarchive]

This space is structured from the continuity of the archive of collaborative practices created in 2019 and continuing its construction towards an anarchive that feeds and increases its collection from the research carried out under the curatorship of PIPA! on an independent, horizontal and democratic basis. The elements that make up this anarchive seek to explore different formats that deconstruct the institutionalised notion of what an archive should be, being mutant and permeable to the diverse processes that are generated from it and that feed back into its content.

Images of residents making use of the archive

︎︎︎ARCHIVING AS A WAY OF KNOWING (AND KNOW ONE SELF)

Since 2021, the art historian Fidel Villar Barquín (ESP)* has been in charge of the revision, ordering, systematisation and analysis of this archive and writes the following text as a reflection on his work.

Over the last few years, the archive has become a permanent reality in the world of contemporary art and art history. The very idea of the archive has only evolved, blurring the very definitions that we could apply to what an archive is.

Michel Foucault in the Archaeology of Knowledge stated that the archive was a system through which culture pronounced itself on the past. How to define an archive? According to the RAE (Royal Spanish Academy of the Language), it is an "ordered set of documents that a person, a society, an institution, etc., produce in the exercise of their functions or activities". There is, therefore, a principle of grouping: the archive requires unifying, identifying, classifying within a system or previously selected elements that will articulate this configuration(01). But archiving is also the very place where they are kept, and the same action of archiving.

Whether it is a physical or virtual archive, fictional or real, these places transform, grow, evolve. Sometimes there is a will from the beginning, a clear knowledge of the direction the materials you have collected are going to take. Sometimes, by pure chance, the materials begin to arrive, the archive is forced to be created, we see a staging of an unwanted archiving. And of a moment in which you realise that there are practices that are connected from the materials that had remained in storage, that the archive itself has mutated, that the materials that fell into your drawers have become related to each other, have spoken and have developed their own groups from which you are now forced to look at them.

This Anarchive, formerly known as the IDYS Archive (Do It Yourself Institute) was focused on research into collaborative practices. In a first approach to the archives there was an intention to look at the archive as a whole, to organise a system that would allow us to know everything that was there. To be able to go beyond the lines of force that were marked and what were the other crossroads that were relevant in the construction of this new Anarchive. This archive is evolving with the idea of nourishing the work of the people invited to carry out residencies in the Espacio de Todo (Space for All), as well as the work of the TXP collective. And that the same material that is being produced in response to what one encounters will be returned to the Anarchive. This creates, therefore, a cyclical will of self-feeding from which to begin the construction of other kinds of discourses.

We cannot, nor do we want to, deny the problems that throughout history have been associated with archiving, evidently no archive is exempt from an outside, no matter how much will we may have, voids always exist, realities and lives never enter an archive in their entirety. Derrida talked about of archival violence(02), and when one looks at what the trafficking of archives from museum institutions has meant, one becomes more aware of the violence of the archive.

We could perhaps agree that for us an archive is a common space, a place from which to generate new systems and elements from which to think collectively, to build together. In these new processes from the Espacio de Todo (Space for All), these intersecting realities allow us to search for a common memory, a meaning beyond the object itself.

The Anarchive is also constituted as a support for the research residencies and the artistic processes of the TXP collective, born as a space from which to decentralise contemporary artistic practices in Madrid, with a relationship with the neighbourhood in which it is located. The archives are crossed by Vallecas, by the struggles of the neighbourhoods, as we could see in the residency "Un grito en la calle" (A shout in the street) by Elena Blesa Cábez. New exercises and political interests are looking southwards, towards migrant bodies in Spain, mourning and colonial order as in the residency Otros(s)ures (Other(s)ouths) by Guille Mongan, Carolina Chacón and Glenda Zapata. These processes are now also our archive, that of anyone who needs it, that of everyone. It is a mutant, changing archive, in constant movement and always open to others, so that they can invade it, underline it, embrace it and make it their own. Because this is how one knows oneself, by conserving, looking at the past to think about the present and directing one's gaze towards the utopia of the future.

Image of the anarchive space

Notes

Anna Maria Guasch, Arte y archivo 1920-2010. Genealogías, tipologías y discontinuidades, Akal, Madrid, 2011, p. 10.
Jacques Derrida, Mal de archivo, Editorial Trotta, Madrid, 1997, p. 15.

*Fidel Villar Barquín (Haro, 1995) holds a degree in Art History and a Master's degree in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture at the Complutense University of Madrid. He has participated in various conferences at national and international universities and has published articles in different magazines. His research is linked to sexual dissidence, the bodies that inhabit the margins, the AIDS crisis and the impact of HIV on the visual arts and literature. He is currently working on his doctorate at the Autónoma University of Madrid under the title: "Derivas desde el sur: un análisis de lo seropositivo" (Drifts from the South: an analysis of the HIV-positive).