Röda Sten Konsthall -Amnesia, 2012

Installation view.

 

An archive holds an inherent doubleness. It organizes and categorizes to immortalize, at the same time as it internalizes and hides. Thus, it counteracts and causes death, simultaneously.

 

The power over our history, and hence our future, lies in (at least partly) how we handle and make use of communal archive systems. An explosive force, created by rearrangements of these archive materials, can displace courses of events, unobtrusive as well as decisive. Consequently, certain collations are altering our collective memories and affect the writing of history as well as power relations.

 

A museum is dismantled and finds its terminal storage. A view of the world and its conventional figure is dissolving. Points of view and the directions of the gaze change, and are mirroring the ideas of more recent times. Old versions are swept away and forgotten. Mistakes are repeated.

 

The relation between human and nature is in forceful transformation, but what this transformation will involve is hard to forecast. Meanwhile, the in-betweenness is taken over by something created by humans, but beyond their control. An organism directed by profit and open competition. Structural forgetfulness.