SYMPOSIA

The venue, Blinken OSA Archives, is not only a repository of important collections, primarily related to the history of the Cold War and grave international human rights violations, but also a laboratory of archival experiments on new ways of assessing, contextualizing, presenting, and making use of archival documents.

Reinterpretation work with an archive is based on the experience of memory, because we can reach the origin of a fact or circumstance by means of 'documents.' An encounter with the archaic is also an archaeological activity. The personal unearthing of various material at an official place of authority consists of recollection work (the search for the lost time). It is concerned here with the personal, subversive reinterpretation of official documents from the archeion (ancient Greek for magistrates' archive building) and questioning the official writing of history. And it is concerned with the emergence of memories that result from the programmatic processing of photographic archival material, as well as the archaeological excavation of previously stored 'impressions,' and the personal decoding of registering and reading records and documents. Or in other words, it is about the communicating and processing of archives.