Image Semiotics / Archives

Teacher: Raphaël Pirenne

The archive is often relegated to a form of the past whose value or use has been neutralized by history. The course will start from the premise that the archive is not necessarily something to be grasped as a collection, despite Arlette Farge's subtle comments on archival collections, but as a piece of land or a garden to be cultivated, where action by action, thought by thought, something will emerge from the soil to benefit from another or a new use value. The first part of the course will be built around collective readings of texts deploying a thought of the archive: Farge, Foucault, Derrida, Agamben, Foster, Lepecki, etc., or exhibitions (Enwezor, Merewether, etc.) or practices crystallizing a thought of the archive (Baloji, Meessen, Eichhorn, Kelly, etc.). The second part is built around a common object that emerges from the discussions and enables us to put into action a way of thinking about the archive.