| Abstrakt: |
This study presents a way to think - or rethink - the archive in its relation with photography and cinema. In its confrontation with these media, the archive opens up to an ontological insight and a pragmatic claim, acquiring the status of an event: records intimate the past, a reality that is already absent and far from us, but they also comprise an opened condition of the referent, which acquires the sense of an imprint-affection that remains in a state of potential energy and return, thus undermining the principles of mimetic representation and linear time. The study therefore provides a way out for the deadlock created both by the positivist and postmodernism assumptions, ineffective to convey the historical and temporal complexity of the archive image, i.e. its ability to capture desire and to establish a system of permutations between what is recorded, remembered and imagined. Inspired by the influential essays of Jacques Derrida, as well as by the reformulation of the notion of the archive in art and art theory, this study endorses the idea that archive remnants are active and unstable, comprising repetitions, survivals and new forms of legibility: archival material is less a closed and accurate register than a creative starting point prone to offer multiple meanings and allowing the viewer to inventively address past and history. The comprehension of this reassessment requires to imagine a beyond the archive, a zone of exteriority in relation to the archive. It is argued that this concerns a movement that leads us from the archive to the atlas. It is the later that encompasses the heterogeneous and vertical features of a mnemotechnics of time and thought, a concept that shall be evaluated in its technical-imaginative aspect. It is also the atlas that allows to carry out the derridean claim concerning a project of archiviology - often commented but rarely practiced - able to map the limits and the possibilities of the archive through a broader relation with other fields that, although surpassing many times the discipline of art history, address the mutual problems of time and image: Freud and the scene of writing in Derrida's deconstruction; Foucault and the metaphysical taxonomies of Jorge Luis Borges; Walter Benjamin and the historical constellations; Georges Didi- Huberman and the survival-image, towards the systematizing of montage as a form of thought in Aby Warburg's historiography. Aby Warburg acquires a relevant position by means of his atlas Mnemosyne, one of the most striking devices of art history, allowing the possibility to think an intersection between the atlas (considered as a new architecture for the archive) and cinema. In the fictional documentary projects of filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Hans- Jürgen Syberberg, the atlas allows to write history through a network of original associations and affinities, fulfilling a demand that arises from the traumatic charge of the past event, signaling a powerlessness to invoke, a moment in which something is unarchived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
