Dismantling the Archive

Archives haunt our imagination. They migrate from old storage spaces to new storage technologies. They legitimize individuals at the intersection of institutions, social media, and private collections. They hover between personal hard drives and anonymous web servers. They write the laws of what can be said. The project Dismantling the Archive - The Art of Disappearance makes archives disappear in order to uncover the paradox of archival practices and thus participate in the development of a contemporary form of archive. At a time in which the archive has become the central metaphor for preservation, The Art of Disappearance is dedicated to the development and reflection of an Aufhebekunst that illuminates and irritates our relationship to collected material. This term exploits the threefold meaning of the German word "Aufhebung" [sublation]: in the sense of to store; in the sense of to abolish, to make disappear; and in the sense of to lift into new contexts. Therefore, the Agentur für Unabkömmlichkeitsbegründungen (AGFU) will access the archive of the former artist collective Fritzpunkt (AF) with the aim of recognizing and questioning the tensions inherent in the objects on the one hand and making the archive disappear consistently and completely on the other. These artistic processes are put to the test by documentation techniques introduced into the Aufhebekunst, which endanger the Art of Disappearance in its consequence. Exemplary multiples produced by the AGFU in the run-up demonstrate to us the hypostatizing of disappearance which the performative installations of The Art of Disappearance will systematically play through: Working notes from the AF cast in epoxy resin are preserved in the multiples and at the same time forever withdrawn from us. Project leader: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Roland Innerhofer, Institut für Germanistik der Universität Wien Kontakt: roland.innerhofer@univie.ac.at Research partner: Ass.-Prof.in Dr.in Rosemarie Brucher, Zentrum für Wissenschaft und Forschung der MUK Wien Kontakt: r.brucher@muk.ac.at Art: Agentur für Unabkömmlichkeitsbegründungen Kontakt: buero@agfu.at

In the classical approach to archives, researchers go into the archives, search for documents, and produce knowledge by shaping these archival materials. This approach has been reversed by discourse analysis and deconstruction. Their "archival turn" is that archives shape what we can recognize. This project takes a dynamic approach to this epistemic structure. It is a provocative undertaking, the exemplary dismantling of an archive that draws our attention to the problems of form that arise from these relationships. Over the course of three years, the project developed a paradoxical art of suspension that made the archive of the art collective Fritzpunkt (2002-2017) disappear, thereby placing the following questions at the center of its research interest. Can an archive make its own disappearance productive? Can identity be based on gaps in the archive? How can an archive be created that cannot be appropriated or exploited and that allows for an emancipatory approach to history? Are the archives of our digital ubiquitous instances that store everything in order to avoid having to remember? The project, carried out in cooperation with the Institute for German Studies at the University of Vienna, the Center for Science and Research at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, and the Agentur für Unabkömmlichkeitsbegründungen, used performative exhibitions, performances and interventions, lectures, workshops, and a symposium to carry out a process that interpreted the art of disappearance with increasing duration in the direction of an art of abandonment and disappearance. Central to this was the main project "The Archive is Present or in Praise of the Gap" (2023), which in a three-stage exhibition (Archive of Presence, Archive as Fragment, Archive as Absence) first exposed all the remaining archive material from the Fritzpunkt archive, then shredded it, and finally sent the shredded objects to 271 archives in Europe and beyond to be reintroduced into the archive cycle. The feedback from the archival institutions that received the shredded objects revealed both approval and rejection of the selection mechanisms of these archives of various genres, and led to the inclusion of the shredded objects in archives and art collections, as well as invitations to congresses to present the approach of the overall project. DISMANTLING THE ARCHIVE - THE ART OF DISAPPEARANCE was put to the test by the documentation techniques introduced into the art of suspension, which endangered the art of disappearance in its consistency. The question discussed with international experts in the symposium "whether or how to document a self-dismantling archive" was finally played out in two projects, a manual of disappearance and a catalog déraisonné, using paradoxical techniques of representation. Two project websites as well as four live radio interviews also make the project comprehensible in retrospect.