Foundation Art and Public SpaceContents OPEN 7 (No)Memory
OPEN 7 (No) Memory. Storing and recalling in contemporary art and culture
The present organization and experience of the public domain are to a significant extent defined by the tension between individual and collective, old and new, autochthonous and allochthonous memories. It is therefore imperative to re-examine the content, the control and the place of memory within the public domain. How can active use be made of the information stored in the current 'memory places'? What is the role of art in this? Is collective remembrance still possible? How can the cultural heritage be made accessible without turning city and country into one big open-air museum? And what are the implications of new media and digital storage technologies for the social and historical process of safe-keeping and remembering?
Jorinde Seijdel
Editorial
Online article
Rudi Laermans
Paradoxes of Patrimonialization
Using several historical lines, the Belgian sociologist Rudi Laermans analyses the present ‘heritage regime’. Actualism, which so dominates the modern era, is characterized by an emphasis on forgetting. The present focus on heritage seems to contradict this. Yet stressing the autonomous value of the past in fact reinforces the division between past and present. According to Laermans they are two sides of the same coin. The often expressed criticism of Disneyfication merely diverts attention.
Online article
Frank van Vree
The Art of Commemoration & the Politics of Memory
Monuments never exist in isolation. Either they are overrun with visitors or languishing in some dead-end street – in either case they are part of the historical culture in which we live, as the legacy of preceding generations, as a product as well as a formative element of the collective memory. But that is not all. Monuments are not only expressions of sentiments, memories and thoughts that are – or were – present among the population, but also political instruments, in the sense that they promote or support particular representations of history. The way in which a society has shaped its past, in monuments and other public anchoring points of memory, in fact says more about that society that about the history itself.
Cor Wagenaar
The Magic Mountain of Belvedere
The Belvedere policy, based on the Dutch government’s 1999 Belvedere Policy Document on the relationship of heritage preservation and spatial planning, strives to make the past operational.
The concept of time and its perception are central to this. If Belvedere intends to be more than a glorified preservation society, it must not limit itself to concrete object-oriented research. A more theoretical approach, involving other design and experience-oriented disciplines, is essential to identify the various conceptions of time.
Wolfgang Ernst
The Archive as Metaphor
From Archival Space to Archival Time
The archive has become a universal metaphor for all conceivable forms of storage and memory. Seen from the media-archaeological perspective of the German theorist Wolfgang Ernst, however, the archive is not dedicated to memory but to the purely technical practice of data storage: any story we add to the archive comes from outside. The archive has no narrative memory, only a calculating one. In a digital culture, Ernst says, the archive in fact changes from an archival space into an archival time, in which the key is the dynamics of the permanent transmission of data. The archive then become literally a ‘metaphor’, with all the possibilities this entails.
Nico Bick
The Archive
A Pictorial Essay
The editors of Open invited the photographer Nico Bick (Arnhem, 1964) to produce a pictorial essay, especially for this issue, about archives, the places in which the tangible proofs of the past are collected and stored. Nico Bick lives and works in Amsterdam. His work is characterized by a penchant for the ostensibly unremarkable, the ordinary aspect of a place.
For this assignment he photographed the archives of the International Institute for Social History, the National Institute for War Documentation and the Municipal Archives in Amsterdam as well as the National Archives in The Hague. He focused on the storage space and not on the content of the archives of its users. He aims to ‘make the structure of the storage clear, as well as making visible the collective memory, which is contained in places that are public, but at the same time hidden’.
Jorinde Seijdel
Cold Storage
Bill Gates’s Image Archive
Corbis Corporation, a private company owned by Bill Gates, owns the electronic reproduction rights to more than 80 million images, of which a portion are made available for purchase via www.corbis.com. Corbis also owns a large number of photo archives. In 2001 the company stored millions of original photographs, negatives, prints, and slides in Iron Mountain, a hermetically sealed, underground storage facility in Pennsylvania. Its ‘cold storage’ stops the chemical deterioration of the images. Is Gates the saviour of the visual memory of the modern era, or a megalomaniac claiming a monopoly over this memory in an unprecedented way? What is the nature of his archive, and what are the implications for art and culture?
Sven Lütticken
The Conspiracy of Publicness
The concealing effect of the mass media is often seen as a conspiracy, in which everything is a plot to erase historical consciousness. In the 1960s William Burroughs, with his cut-up trilogy, created a literary mythology that managed to appropriate and manipulate the myths of the mass media, so that a sort of counter-publicness could emerge. Now that many subcultural myths have been co-opted by the media, Sven Lütticken argues it is time for a new Burroughs: the myths must once again be unmasked and deployed in a new form as an instrument of criticism against the conspiracy of publicness.
Online article
Geert Lovink
Unbombing & Ars Memoria
An Interview with Tjebbe van Tijen
Visual artist and archivist Tjebbe van Tijen (1944) is interested in the functioning and the creation of collective memory. He concentrates on the gathering of data that generate meanings which deviate from official interpretations. This can lead to a more differentiated picture of the past and of the way in which we remember it. To this end Van Tijen makes use of material as well as virtual media and regards them as an inseparable whole. This interview by media theorist Geert Lovink focuses extensively, among other things, on Van Tijen’s project Unbombing the World 1911-2011.
Joke Robaard
Sixty-five Situations
What’s the ‘archive’? You say that for Foucault the archive is ‘audiovisual’?
Henk Oosterling
Column Urban interest: art as public space
Online article
Nico Dockx
Curious
The Belgian artist Nico Dockx (1974) works out of a fundamental preoccupation with the archive, with structural processes like inventory, memory, information, distribution and management. His multimedia work comes into being through co-operative projects, and nestles in continually different settings. In 2003–2004 he took part, among other things, in Utopia Station at the Biennale in Venice and performed an intervention at the MuHKA (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Antwerp. CURIOUS is his own independent label.
Hans Aarsman
The Days when Everything was Possible
Arnoud Holleman
WE
Arnoud Holleman wrote a text for the project Proeftuin Twente1 in which he examines what forces are at play in the longing for a regional identity. This examination was a prelude to Proeftuin Twente, the central question of which is what the specific character of Twente is and how this can play a role in the development of a perspective on the future of the area. The text is based on conversations with a large number of people who, whether professionally or as a hobby or because of their background, are concerned with Twente culture.
Barbara Visser
Back to fiction
In the 1970s and ’80s, the then PTT (the Dutch Post Office, now TPG) established 12 major distribution hubs (known by the Dutch acronym EKP) close to railway stations. Together they form a network covering the whole of the Netherlands, the ‘Sternet’ (‘Star Network’).
Just a decade later, these hubs are already obsolete, thanks to changing insights and changing postal systems. They stand vacant, are threatened with demolition, or are being put to temporary uses, such as accommodation for the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. It seems like their destiny has primarily been decided by economic considerations.
Artists and architects were commissioned by the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) and the Foundation for Art in Public Space (SKOR) to develop a vision for the buildings and the network, to consider the cultural value of the Sternet, and to think more generally about whether or not to conserve this young cultural heritage.1 Barbara Visser was one member of this group. She wrote a letter to the artists and architects who were involved in designing the EKPs (Sternet) and creating the accompanying art projects, asking them to reconsider their designs or work of art based on what they know now.
Brigitte van der Sande
Partners
Ydessa Hendeles’s Holocaust Memorial
In last year’s exhibition ‘Partners’ at the Haus der Kunst in Munich the Canadian curator and collector Ydessa Hendeles broke the tacit laws of Holocaust memorials. Grouping objects of different natures and placing them in a single context, created all manner of fascinating cross-connections among the objects and with the building, laden by the Nazi past.
Stef Scagliola
Memorial Strategies in a Multicultural Society
Two recent initiatives are illustrative of the desire to make the Dutch commemoration of the Second World War fit into the frame of reference of immigrants to the Netherlands. Demographic changes and the importance of this war to our national identity make a course change imperative. An exchange of perspectives in the commemoration culture goes hand in hand with social integration and education.
Jordan Crandall
Memory under Fire
The Importance of a Counter-Memory in the Representation of Violence
Visual artist and media theorist Jordan Crandall, in the project Under Fire, which was recently exhibited at the Witte de With centre in Rotterdam,1 examines the significance of the representation of armed conflicts. According to Crandall, it is imperative that attention be shifted from what an image means to what an image does. By developing a sort of counter-memory, it may be possible to expand our outlook and acquire more insight into the political and cultural dimensions of the representation of war in a globalized world.
Paul Meurs
Segregated but United
Memory in the City of Tomorrow
The history represented by Delfshaven in Rotterdam is its role as a storage depot for the VOC (the Dutch East Indies Company), a heritage to which the present-day population no longer relates. It is illustrative of the general tendency to preserve and grasp at cultural heritage, without the slightest notion of a structuring framework, in order to create ‘identity’. Paul Meurs makes an appeal for selective choices, so that it will once again be possible to add new substance to the collective memory
of the Netherlands.
