Productive Archiving: Artistic Strategies, Future Memories, and Fluid Identities

Archival organisation is a basic symbolic mode with which we organise our lives and the past, present, and future. Productive Archiving discusses a variety of problems in archival organisation, in particular three issues that are usually overlooked in archives: the question of inclusion or exclusion; the loss of individuality and specificity (i.e., homogenisation); and that archiving may become a form of pigeonholing, putting specific identities into a confined space. This book suggests exploring constructive and creative solutions, especially through the example of artistic archives, which tend to offer speculative, unexpected ways to order, select, and narrate information.

272 pages, 17 x 24 cm, softcover, Valiz (Amsterdam).