Wetland burns. Fluvial drifts in the Carnevale archive

Abstract

This paper explores the Graciela Carnevale archive in order to highlight the territorial practices of sensitive perception that her producer has been carrying out for more than a decade. We face a personal archive, and at the same time collective, that follows the vital pulse of fifty-five years of artistic work with its interruptions, silences and destructions. Since the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, the chronological order has been noticeably altered by the interceptions and redefinitions caused by the successive exhumations of the itinerary of the sixties. Affected by the evil of the archive, our exploration suffered multiple deviations and was subjected to a logic and a time alien to the protocols of traditional archival research. In a space where autobiography and archive are confused, we were deeply impacted by forms of life that assume the world of things as a vibrating bodies. How to transfer this experience? How to archive a work that is constituted as a series of events in the manner of a performance embodied on earth? What kind of relationship can we establish between the “wetland” section and the consolidated area of the 1960s archive? How to order a fund that is constituted from a series of assemblages in an interconnected network of humans, non-humans and machines? Faced with the challenge presented by a living archive, we propose to figure Graciela Carnevale as an artist-as-archivist (Foster). Her archive is configured as a hybrid that crosses traditional archiving technologies and unconventional forms. Without the requirements of historical reconstruction and without the premises of order and principle, typical of the modern archival ratio that would reject any anarchic existence of documentary collections, it is necessary to think Carnevale’s Archive from the disruptive force of the event that critically interferes in the reality.