ARCHIVES AND EMOTIONAL CAPITAL
with Clara Mares, Norbert Petrovici, Florin Poenaru & BMR
*ST replaced BMR at the job at the Center for Individual Study
The debate revolved around the emotions regarding discovering, reading, interpreting archives. There were four points of view presented: Clara Mares - a researcher working on the Securitate files (CNSAS), Florin Poenaru - an anthropologist taking a critical approach to the reinterpretation of the communist past today, Norbert Petrovici - a sociologist who studies archives revealing for contemporary urban processes and BMR's own concern with fictional archives (such as Stanescu/Ghirtoiu). We were interested in the artists's involvement with wrapping, designing and animating the archives, creating interfaces for the delivery of these archives into the public space. The ideological and political role of both artists and researchers in this process needs careful attention and analysis.
We further discussed about the dynamics of truth production and fictionalization occurring while interpreting files written by people about people, with loads of autobiographical and personal content to be processed under the name of objective historical data. Another interesting aspect was the debate around ordering, classifying and hierarchizing archives which was made possible only by the bureaucratic apparatus of the state.
