Courses and Seminars
Archives. Good and bad for museums
Thursday, 31 March 2022
On the occasion of “The Paris of Brassaï. Photographs of the City Picasso Loved”
Classifying, recording, and archiving memory is still a typically human act which has historical, ethical, political, and legal consequences and involves a certain degree of discrimination. This task, which has become an institutionalized “need” to “record everything, leave nothing out, and lose nothing” was described by Derrida as “Archive Fever.”
The life of museums and cultural institutions is recorded in these repositories according to standard parameters whose material nature has, for some time now, been undergoing a foundational crisis that is obliging us to rethink methods of archiving, means of consultation, and the sense of physically accessing documents: going from compact cabinets to the cloud, from indexes to search engines, and from research rooms to laptops. From the obsolete box-file to the magic gigapixel.
The idiosyncrasies of archived materials themselves are also greater and more varied than before: sound, video, graphic and digital files, amongst others, present a challenge in terms of working out the raison d’être of the archive today, as well as for the task of conservation.
As a forum where professionals can exchange ideas and learn from experts about the current situation in Spain, this seminar looks at two complementary realities: material and immaterial archives. The aim is to highlight and discover some of Spain’s most innovative experiences.
Dates
Thursday, 31 March 2022
Place
Programme
10 am Welcome Speech José Lebrero Stals. Museo Picasso Málaga Artistic Director
10.30 am Archive Fever in Contemporary Art. From the Material Archive to the Cyber Archive Anna Maria Guasch. Professor of contemporary art history, Universitat de Barcelona.
11.10 am The Photo Library of the Instituto de Patrimonio Cultural de España Guillermo Enríquez de Salamanca. Head of Documentation Section.
11.30 am The Archives of the Museu Picasso de Barcelona. Living and Mutating Archives Sílvia Domènech. Head of the Museu Picasso de Barcelona’s Knowledge and Research Centre
11.50 am The Photography Collection of the University of Navarra Museum. A Journey Through the History of this Medium in Spain Ignacio Migueliz. Chief Curator of the Museum Collections of the University of Navarra
12.10 pm Break
12.30 pm Roundtable: Material Archives: Object, Conservation and VConsultation
5 pm The Lafuente Archive. José María Lafuente. Director of the Archivo Lafuente.
6 pm The Archive and Archives of the Museo Nacional del Prado: Documents, Data and Stories Javier Pantoja. Head of Digital Development Area. Prado National Museum.
6.20 pm The Archive of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. 15 years of experience Sònia Aran. Documentalist and coordinator of the CCCB Archives
6.40 pm Break
7 pm Roundtable: Intangible Archives: Typologies, Networks and Diffusion
The seminar programme is subject to changes in the content and running order of the talks.
Related Exhibition
The Paris of Brassaï
Photographs of the City Picasso Loved