The September issue of online journal The Mass has awaken the anarchivist in me.
A while back I was deeply involved in anarchiving the collection of artworks and unfinished projects my friend the artist Bujar Marika left behind when he passed away. Together with the help of his family we inventoried, photographed, scanned, studied, stored, and more, a great deal of items. The local contemporary art museum had committed to publish his monography, and I had taken part to an academic symposium on the question of restitution ... things were looking good even if we were not advancing as fast as nor with as much support as we wished. We had everything else that happens in life to deal with, work, family, the usual, but we were persistent. What threw us off the tracks was the withdrawal of the publication deal from the museum after a change in it's directorship. We lost the momentum. Some years have past, perhaps also necessary in the process of mourning that we clearly underestimated, the work done is not lost and looking back at it, new perspectives arise.
Indeed searching through this archive for the purpose of writing an English translation to the original essay, closely reading the text and reimagining the ideas proposed, the spirit of the anarchive resurfaced. Thus I have chosen to publish along side of the main article a call to action ...
In keeping with the proposal I made at the time aiming to revisit the traditional way of managing artists' estate in favor of a new way of collectively participating in its anarchiving!
The anarchive is the magic of making new from old or "of celebrating the past as a regained present" as the great media historian Siegfried Zielinski would phrase it! Today it's never been easier to produce archives - think of all the media we produce every second, of every post written, of every image taken, of every soundbite shared - and it's also never been easier to share this material. But if we don't want to merely crawl under the sheer amount of stuff we generate, we must become anarchivists of our own archives and of the archives of our closed ones and why not of the archives of total strangers.... Only thus may we make sense of the world we live in and remain ungoverned!
Read The Mass here