“There, we said, and in this place. How are we to think of there? To shelter itself and, sheltered, to conceal itself.
There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratisation can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.
There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside.”
Jacques Derrida remarked the above during a lecture at the Freud Museum in 1994, describing the relationship between archives, memory, and technology. Guy Atkins writes that Derrida figures the act of archiving as contradictory: “they are simultaneously public and private spaces, institutive and conservative, traditional and revolutionary.”
Comprising collage, painting, and sculpture, the works of Florence Carr, Edie Duffy, and Ian Waelder connect to different notions of Derrida’s remarks, thematising material histories, distance and closure, traces and memories.
at Petrine, Paris
until February 22, 2025