Bringing one’s own intimacy closer to that of others

 
‘First of all, the chaos that could come from each individual releasing his own secret world must be unified into a shared experience.’

(from Peter Brook’s ‘The Golden Fish’)

‘Men are inclined to lay the chief stress on likeness and not on difference. We seek to know how a thing is related to us, and not if it is strange.’

(from Henry David Thoreau’s journals, 17 June 1840”)

 
The effort of expressing oneself in order to say something that coincides effectively with an interior reality comes from the desire to find a counterpart and to join other individualities which relate to one’s own either in terms of assonance or dissonance.
Connecting my own archive to other archives, introducing my world to the shared space of the web means wanting to connect with other worlds. Having decided to make my archive accessible in this same place where we find ourselves for me means having made public my inner part in an attempt to find an interlocutor, which I have hoped for so much. Having formed, organised and explicated my cosmos in solitude, like a separate being, does not mean imagining a separate universe, but yearning to feel part of a collectiveness.
This small magical world created with its forms and rules is not perceived as something that is also of value for others, but as a microbe individuality that has the possibility of being put together with others.
Putting one’s own archive alongside other archives therefore means starting from a forged reality,
starting from the inside, a reality that is compact and organically functional, albeit limping and incoherent, but to bring it closer to other realties that have likewise been defined by their intrinsic natures.
Precisely due to its simultaneously systematic yet mobile nature, the archive also has the possibility of readjusting with a new form and of crossing more subjective lines, always defining different narrations, relating, meeting and mixing, and in some cases even amalgamating with others.
Any archive has to have the ability to relate with the external in order to be alive. Its interior language has to be translated to become understandable, to connect with a broader archiving system. It is necessary to construct one’s own algorithm that helps decipher one’s own thought but also to make it clear to others.
To conclude, what I am trying to pull out from all these thoughts is that not one archive exists, but a myriad of archives, which needs to eschew the idea of one possible world, of one possible story, of one possible vision and instead lean towards a universe made of a constellation of lots of possible planets.
 
THE ARCHIVE AS A POLITICAL ACT
If we think of the archive in a metaphorical sense and therefore as the most open way to keep the history, the soul of an entity (entity in the sense of an individual person but also as the record of a group of human beings and even of other natural subjects or inanimate things) to ensure that everyone and everything, but absolutely everyone and everything, even the smallest, shyest, most hidden, silent, secluded entities have the right to be taken into consideration and continue to exist, then we could dare to say that the archive can be the means for everyone to be co-present in this world and the tool that can help us to participate in a shared life navigating alongside one another.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
(Written in 2022)