How to Do Things with Documents

10.11.15

Tomorrow, November 11 at 7 p.m., the
Fundació Antoni Tàpies
will inaugurate

How To Do Things With Documents

, a group exhibition in which we are participating along with Roger Bernat, Lúa Coderch, Experimentem amb l’ART, Objetologías and Pep Vidal. The exhibition presents the work processes developed throughout this year 2015 as a result of the Foundation’s invitation to «interpret» the exhibition archive of the institution itself. As the project’s driving team says—formed by  Oriol Fontdevila, Núria Soler and Linda Valdés— «How To Do Things With Documents is not another exhibition based on the archive, or institutional critique, but an exhibition in the archive, an intervention perpetrated in the very heart of the exhibition» that will unfold in the Foundation’s own offices. Ultimately, the invitation urged us to reflect and experiment on the possibility of interpreting and activating the archive as a testing ground for new articulations and commitments of the museum institution with social contexts.

Thus, invited to participate in this proposal we thought about how we could situate our research and assemble it with the processes and the territory in which we daily develop our activity: in recent years we had promoted various actions linked to the memory of informal settlements in Barcelona that led us to devise a series of processes grouped into what we call the
Center for the Interpretation of the City from the Shack
(CICdB); on the other hand, a research group on the phenomenon of shantytowns, promoted by the
Centre d’Estudis de L’Hospitalet
(CELH) and some neighbors, had begun to organize in L’Hospitalet, to which we joined.  

One of the main lines of work of the CICdB is, precisely, the creation of an archive that responds to the very nature of the informal city. This purpose stems from the observation of the isomorphism  
between the archives and the institutions of which they are part, which led us to ask ourselves what logics and ways of archiving would correspond to subordinate and informal spaces and practices.
Thus, our participation in
How to do things with documents
does not focus on the documents themselves in the Antoni Tàpies Foundation archive, but invites its archivists to collaborate in the conceptualization of the informal and subaltern archive of the CICdB. This process will be visible on November 26, 27 and 28 during the public work day that we will organize at the Centre Cultural Bellvitge-el Gornal and in which guests will participate, including residents of the old shantytowns of L’Hospitalet, the Centre d’Estudis de L’Hospitalet, the Grup Pas a Pas (a collective of historians who are members of the Citizen Commission for the Recovery of the Memory of the Shanty Towns of Barcelona), the Centre d’Estudis de Montjuïc,  Marià Hispano (archivist responsible, among many others, for the exhibition archive of the Antoni Tàpies Foundation), Núria Ricart (professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the UB and one of the promoters of the project

Memory of the Women’s Prison of Les Corts

), the association Lachó Bají Calí or Jorge Blasco (an “amateur” archivist, as he defines himself, and responsible for the project
Culturas de Archivo
). As we were saying, this conference starts from a question: What should the CICdB archive be like? And a first working hypothesis: it should be a dialogical device, that is, a network of relationships between discourses, ways of doing, measures, utensils and installations that develops and exposes the controversies about its own origin and construction, and promotes debate around this problem.

This exhibition is part of the European network project


Performing the Museum

.