The Archive as Project
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About the publication
This web publication is a part of vnLab publishing series. This new, web-based format called PubLab was developed to bring together digital books, interactivity, custom design and interoperability.
Archive as Project is a re-edition of a paper publication with the same title, first published by Archeology of Photography Foundation in 2011, which summed up a conference organized in Warsaw that same year. It is the first publication of the series of vnLab & Lodz Filmschool web publications.
This book is an attempt at rethinking the archive in a post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe that is still facing the need to work through its 20th century past. Within this process, in the discourse of which such notions as truth and justice keep resurfacing, archives and their uses have come to play a considerable role. In this sense, The Archive as Project should be understood as a continuation and expansion of the problematics of the seminar Archive Fever. The Archives of Contemporary History and Art in Poland After 1989 (Warsaw, 2009), a forum for (art) historians, curators and artists to discuss the topic and problem of the “archive” in the context of the post-socialist transformations of this part of the world.
However, it is above all photographic archives, which seem in recent years to have been going through a phase of great public interest and increasing significance, that are at the center of this book. The question of the role of the photographic archive – not only for the humanities, but also for artistic practice and politics – the perspectives it opens and eventual risks it engenders, is one that seems crucial in the wake of the “archival turn” that we saw taking place since mid 90s.