How To Do Things With Documents
The Archive of the Fundació’s activities is a space where contemporary art discourses come face to face with the praxis.
Roger Bernat, Lúa Coderch, Experimentem amb l’ART, LaFundició, Objetologías and Pep Vidal were invited by the Fundació to carry out research work on the Archive.
The Archive of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies contains a postcard that highlights the relation that existed between Hans Haacke and Manuel Borja-Villel during the exhibition Hans Haacke. ‘Obra Social’, 1995. The artist thanks the then director of the Fundació for recommending a holiday destination.
The Archive of the Fundació’s activities is a space where contemporary art discourses come face to face with the praxis. It thus becomes an indispensable resource for institutional critique and, above all, for a revision of the emergency forms that have become part of the critical discourses in art, and which an institution such as the Fundació has consolidated within its context throughout its twenty-five years of existence.
What can mediation in museums teach us? To what extent can institutional critique and curatorial research generate not only artworks but alternatives? Is the archive an appropriate space for testing other policies in culture and in art?
Roger Bernat, Lúa Coderch, Experimentem amb l’ART, LaFundició, Objetologías and Pep Vidal were invited by the Fundació to carry out research work on the Archive. During 2015 they have conducted approximations to the registers of mediation from different perspectives and methods of analysis, resulting in collaborations with various organisations and agents from the socio-cultural world.
How to Do Things with Documents is not, therefore, yet another exhibition based on the archive or institutional critique. It is an exhibition in the archive, an intervention carried out right at the heart of the institution. Basically it takes place within the office space of the Fundació and includes initiatives that require travelling to other places, such as a day of exchanges between the staff of the Fundació and the teacher and director staff from Escola Dovella (23 November) and a workshop for the creation of an archive on slums and the informal town of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat (26 to 28 November).
On 2 and 3 November there will be two evening sessions with live presentations of the research carried out by the artists. Also taking part will be the project’s international partners, Performing the Museum.
