“Destroy, she said”

The archive between archivo-philia and archivo-phobia

Abstract

This paper is based on a talk given at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest in February 2020, in the context of an international conference organized by the Artpool Art Reasearch Centre, titled Artpool40 – Active Archives and Art Networks. It centers on the destruction of archives as art practice. It focuses on specific examples of artists – several from Eastern Europe, but not only – who destroy archives not in an effort to reach for a metaphysics of annihilation, but as a set of concrete techniques aimed at the demonstration that, on the contrary, to paraphrase Umberto Eco, there can be no such thing as an “ars oblivionalis” and that even the most robust act of destruction creates its own memory, monument, and archive.