Establishing the archive personally in the strictest sense, even if clearly something the artist does personally nevertheless contains subjective analyses.

 
 
‘…My desire is to know what I have lived, that I may know how to live henceforth.’

(from Henry David Thoreau’s journals, 12 November 1837)

 
 
What happens when it is the artist who takes on the role of being the archivist of her own work, when it is she herself who personally deals with the detached organisation and analysis of what she has created during a piece of her existence? How does she face this backward path? How does she go back over her work, how does she look at herself again and above all how does she interpret and give meaning to everything that she has poured out into reality?
Moreover, what does she do if she takes on this position in a creative sense, or if she starts to treat this material in the same way she treats her painted works, for example? What does she mean when she says she considers the act of archiving as an artistic act?
 
As soon as I started constructing the archive of all my work, I found myself before a magmatic chaos that I had to try and give shape and meaning to. I started from the experience and not from a preordained theory. I worked for years, making one thing appear after another, without ever stopping, and above all without ever defining, entitling and encapsulating each thing. It is true that alongside my painting process there was always a form of thinking and writing dedicated to trying to understand what I was doing, but without ever having a vision of the work as a whole. I stood next to every little piece that was produced without having the awareness that it was merely a fragment of something much bigger.
Years later, when I took in hand all this shapeless mass, it triggered the desire to take inside my world not only this substance as a fact, but also the reasoning behind it and the organisation that put it together. I incorporated the reflection, the cataloguing and the maintenance of its history, considering all of this as equal to the act of painting a colour on a canvas.
 
The act of archiving has allowed me to identify and emphasis a series of concepts which, alongside the actual works, together organically define the concrete image of my world. Selecting, deciding what to keep and what to let go of, establishing what to give importance to, is an enterprise that not only determines an idea, but also a configuration, a form. Constructing your own algorithm by yourself helps you to decipher your own way of thinking and propels you towards a point in which you are the one directing it and not where others necessarily want to make you go.
For example, using neologisms to name the central structures of my system means saying that it is important to invent your own terms, that you don’t have to accept things as they come, that you can try to imagine your own glossary. Or creating a dating system, for example, that also keeps in consideration works that no longer exist, works in progress or works which have never existed means you are stating that nothing is blocked in a definitive image, that everything is transitory and that sometimes things only need to be imagined in order for them to exist.
 
It is always important to keep the system open, never closing it in a blocked and rigid structure, which would barricade it in a prison. There is no need to conform to anything, even oneself.
Rather, it is about archiving a process, always keeping, a reflection on what is being done open and never concluded, allowing an open and initially shapeless form to emerge. The archive can only follow this organic substance, following it, forcing itself and bending in its own frame to adapt to its movement.
 
I have decided to assume the responsibility as an artist of taking the archive on also with the desire to pass it on to someone else at some point, because I think it is fundamental to giving a particular inclination to what I do, to what I think, because it is the place where documents are produced, where materials are deposited and where the cataloguing systems are decided,.
My way of cataloguing, which has also become a form of interpretation, is nothing more than the primary codification, with the hope that others will be added. My desire is that someone else’s gaze will come alongside mine perhaps through the adjacent construction of a ‘hyperarchive’, like a hypertext that runs alongside, not substituting it but adding something to mine.
Just as in the rest of my work, it is a way of conserving the succession of events through the constant stratification of one thing on top of another, so, in the same way I imagine my archive as a sedimentation of thought on top of another sedimentation of thought, ensuring that different perspectives coexist without undermining each other.
 
The archiving of my work has become like a tautology included in the archive itself. If all my work is based on a system of structures that keep, accommodate, support, conserve and organise the colour, the emotivity, the substance of existence, then I can say that this space I have constructed is truly the archive of all my archives. In a certain sense, in a system of Chinese boxes, it is as if the ‘Archivearchive’ were the last big external box, the large container that encompasses and includes all the others, allowing it to constantly regenerate.
 
 
(Text written in 2022)