︎︎︎FILE WHITHOUT MUMMIFYING
september - in progress , 2025
What's going on here? Who are you? What's your name? How did you get here?
Javier and Selina* approach the “Todo por la Praxis” archive with the enthusiasm of a scientific expedition that requires travel and technology. They do not start from an idea that they hope to confirm with these activities, but quite the opposite. Both the methodologies and techniques undergo modifications throughout the process. The main thing for them is to listen to what the documents, objects, and things they find there tell them. They try to identify what they say to each other and put them in conversation with beings we encounter in our travels or in the premises itself.
They create a world of description and cataloging specially designed to deal with documents that resist cataloging. They would like to return critically to the starting point.
*Selina Blasco is a professor and Javier Pérez Iglesias is a librarian, both at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Complutense University of Madrid. Selina practices research and teaching open to the propositions of art, and Javier develops his work based on the idea that the library is a collective and unfinished work of art. They have worked together on issues related to the exploration of possible intersections between objects and materialities that exist in the arts, libraries, and archives. They are interested in the possibilities of an “affectionate cataloging” of documents that takes into account the desiring forces that created them and brought them to the library. They are also interested in the marks on publications that are evidence of their material use (crossings-out, underlining, margin notes, forgotten papers inside, etc.) and their analysis as a reflection of the collective construction of knowledge.
They are currently conducting research on the possibility of a living archive of the performing arts as part of the “Endangered Species” project created by Dorothy Michaels, a collective office for production and research in the field of live arts.
https://goo.gl/iUkH2W http://www.directorioexit.info/ficha604 https://www.ucm.es/historiadelarte/selina-blaSco