ARCHIVING ONESELF

Letting things happen, holding on, cataloguing and then archiving

 
‘I transferred the indispensable numbers from the dark green 1989 diary to the 1990 dark red one with lighter stripes…’

(From Goliarda Sapienza’s notebooks, January 1990)

I tidied up the room full of books because the chaos was making my head spin, and I really need silence and order.

Monday 25 October 1948, Giorgio Caproni

 
This chapter is like a book inside a book which is the ‘Self-Portrait’ part of my site.
I re-read and narrate everything that I have covered in those chapters from a different angle, giving them a structure that I connect precisely to the idea of archive, which has become the basis of my work.
 
Whilst reading, if something does not seem clear, I would advise you to consult the constantly updated ‘Glossary’, which is in the ‘Explicating’ chapter.
I am adding it here as an attachment in the version updated on 22/02/2022.

A PAINTER ARCHIVIST
If I had to describe myself in two words, I would say that I am a ‘painter archivist’ in the sense that I allow the act of painting to regenerate itself ad infinitum, generating painterly substance, and then I devote a lot of attention to archiving all its traces. The archive as a meta-work is the place where everything is reunited. It is the form that helps to keep the story in continuous transformation, and it is also the propulsive force for further generative actions.
 
FROM CHAOS TO ORDER
Essentially, everything I have done and continue to do is nothing more than an attempt to create order to an organic substance, trying to make the chaos real.
In an oscillatory process, which continually shifts from letting the substance form to organising the thinking that shaped it, it moves in a rhythm of expansion and contraction, like the pulsations of a vital organ, to determine the imagination of a world.
 
AN ARCHIVE FOR LIVING
With the title ‘Archiving Oneself’ I am trying to evoke the importance of archiving oneself as a form of asserting my being in the world, whereas here I would like to start by saying that you need to put everything into archiving in order not to archive, in the sense – as Antonio Cederna’s phrase says in the image I have chosen to open this chapter – that it is necessary to conceive an archive not so much to archive our memory or immobilise ourselves in any form of unequivocal and blocked historicization, but instead we should think of archiving ourselves as an act of life.
I can say that I made this organic entity because it is useful to me while I am alive and not when I am dead. I activated an archive that follows the trail of existence; it is not a container that only serves to amass everything that has happened and passed. It is a way of keeping tracks of life in medias res, to archive while things happen, to think about them and understand what I am doing.
 
ARCHIVE AS IMAGE, FORM AND PARADIGM
I consider the very gesture of cataloguing, conserving and memorising in the same way I think about all the reasoning around my method: that is is an artistic work in itself. From the archive in the strict sense of the archive work, the correspondence between what I do as an artist and the philosophy of the archive have ensured that the archive has become a paradigm for expressing my total vision. The connection between the practice of archiving and my way of working has modelled a world made of shapes that reveal within it not only the space to allow things to happen but also space dedicated to their care and the maintenance of their story. In a complex system of things, it has gone on to determine a situation where the true works also become documents and where at the same time the documents that document the works also assume a statute of being real works.

 
COMPACTOR ARCHIVE
The archive is the only place where the work consisting of thousands of fragments is kept all together in one place. Owning one of my works means having a piece of the body, a mere scrap of a much vaster and more complex organism. The individual portion only makes sense in relation to all the rest and is completed in the archive, which thus becomes the only form capable of keeping each element connected and where the story that is in constant transformation can be updated.
 
ENCOMPASSING ARCHIVE*
An organic system of things produced during the arc of my existence, which are interconnected and never stop, insisting on growing and changing, they constantly generate others.
In this order of things failure is not contemplated, there is no error, no elimination, no waste.
Every substance that is made concrete, every object that is formed is collected, accommodated and integrated in a cosmos where every essence depends on the others. Everything is incorporated and considered an integral part of a system which is there to represent life itself. In fact, in the archive I decided that as well as the presence of all the works produced, there should also be those that no longer exist or the ones only imagined in my head that are not present in the real world yet and which perhaps never will be, thinking ideally of remaining there in that precise position where things do not necessarily have to happen, but which potentially could.
 
REACTIVATING ARCHIVE**
Each of my works has the possibility of being taken up again and transformed. Everything has the potential to start over and be continued. Knowing that nothing is permanent and that everything contains its eternal transformation means that there is space for an open and multiple vision rather than a monolithic and absolute one.
This structure has slowly been organised over the years, adapting its form to the contents rather than the other way around. The works increase and change, but so do the relationships between them just as in life everything is always transformed.
The cataloguing order is always arbitrary, it is always possible to add or substitute one form of cataloguing with another. What I mean by that is that cataloguing, just like the archive, or rather the form that all the act of cataloguing merges into, is subject to perennial mutation.
Accepting the permutation of things is at the basis of everything I do and consequently the essential prerogative is to always change the order of the structures that contain them.
If my entire way of working is determined by a continuative progress that slowly leads to a transformation of the substance, the colour and the thinking around this practice, the devices needed to contain and permit the substance to form also have to change over time. They have to arrange themselves around the internal landslide, the weight of the body and the complexity of the thoughts.
This means having to start from the interior subject, letting it be independent to become whatever is has to become and not from constructing a structure and a closed method to imprison its spirit. It is necessary to give the essence the chance to evolve, helping it through systems which can help it and support it. What I have tried to establish is not an order decided a priori, but a complexity that has been structured following a process that is innate to the internal nature of things and which occasionally undergoes a shattering to then reorganise itself in another form.
 
ARCHIVE AND MULTIPLE VISIONS
The idea of multiplicities rather than unicity is intrinsic to the concept of the archive. As soon as the organisation and ordering of things begins, everything is placed horizontally, on the same level, without any hierarchical order. Nothing is predetermined a priori or imagined in a single final vision. The way I experience what I do ensures that things happen one after the other without planning them, leaving the possibility open for these things to then stir themselves, agglomerate, unite, link up in a different way, always offering different readings.
The works themselves, leaving the ‘Archivers’, aggregate and are installed in reality and each time they assume different forms, just as their documentation contained in the archive is reorganised each time in a multiform way, giving life to new visions.
A sum of things not so much to conserve as to connect to each other in lots of different ways.
 
 
 
*I constructed the chapter ‘Letting things exist as they are’ to talk about the inclusion of every event in the archive. In it, I speak about the dating and the situation of each individual work.
 
** I talk about the continuous transformation of each thing in the following chapters: ‘Modifying’, where I have described how each single element that makes up the archive has been modified over the years; ‘Witnessing the transformation’, in which I talk about the material fate of the work.
 
(Text written in 2022, incorporating some previous texts. Modified in 2023, 2024)