What I am writing here is my particular response. It is not typical of either an artist or an archivist. I am not justifying the use of archives nor their use in creative practice. In fact I might be problematising this area further.
In the 1990s and the 2000s there was an increased focus on the meaning of “the archive” in both critical/cultural/liberal arts theory and the art world.
Archival practice had a particular history within modernity, and with the practice of history writing.
But the “archival turn” seemed to evolve not quite from the day to day practice of archivists’ work, but independently of it.
Literary critics and theorists turned to the archives. Historians turned (in a new way? With a new purpose?). Artists both turned to them and/or were characterised in a new way as having an “archival impulse”.
Ironically (but not accidentally?), the “turn” *towards* archives seemed to emerge at a moment when “history” (or perhaps, History) per se, came into crisis. Expressed most clearly in Fukuyama’s pronouncement of its “end”, but had also been emerging through other western liberal approaches such as decolonisation, which welcomed a pluralising small h histories, deliberately placing the coherency of single a narrative into question.
Whilst many had nuanced takes, critical of some of these tendencies, it does feel in some way that the turn to (question, investigate) the archive was born from a sense of incoherence, or perhaps crisis in the meaning of history.
This itself prompted, even in an attraction towards the archive, a critical stance to it: to highlight the silences, the potential biases. etc
Questions about “historicity” and questions about historiography preceded and framed this turn towards the archives. But, even, it might be argued, perhaps, did a sort of disregard for history(?History) altogether. Some may argue this was in favour of a pluralisation of historical narratives. But at its extreme end the idea of ‘truth’ or ‘evidence’ might have been devalued all together.
Perhaps, from a creative perspective, this provides certain opportunities, for new kinds of storytelling, or different ways of ‘truth-telling’.
But this turn has new risks: obscuring or de-valorising the evidence we do have, and our attempts to coherently explain what happened, how, and why.
What is, or are, the purpose of archives, then, after this Turn?
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