Preserving the memory
Text written by
Tuçe Erel
With an artist
Štěpánka Sigmundová
On 12 September 2018 Berlin Sessions organized an artist talk at Czech Cultural Center Berlin for their recent artist in residence Štěpánka Sigmundová. This included a talk about archival practices in the arts by Carrie Skinner (artist, archivist) and myself, Tuce Erel (curator, art writer).
Archiving is an unending process. There is no way to stop archives from growing. An archive will always remain an unfinished work. This is the tricky but beautiful part of archives.
What is an archive?
What is the purpose of an archive?
What is the materiality of the archive in the digital age?
View this post on InstagramExternal Memory (2009-/) #diplomawork #collection #archive #20000 #photographs
View this post on InstagramExternal Memory (2009-/) #diplomawork #collection #archive #20000 #photographs
According to Heidenreich, “The archive is a place, that takes things, keeps them, and hands them out again. These things may be objects or data. The place may be a physical location or just a file with its address as URL.” [1] This is how Rabih Mroué talks about his artistic work, which has been growing since 1989. His archive is like an unlived memory. There are several sections in his archive including collected information from newspapers and television news that refers to the collective amnesia of the society in Lebanon concerning their recent past of war. [2]
How can one measure the value of the archive and its content? Who is the authority to decide its accessibility? What kind of memory is created? As Heidenreich states:
Archives externalize process of memory. But they also extend these processes far beyond human capacities. Instead of being restricted to a passive mirror, the archive becomes an active entity with effects on the information processing of its information environment. Whatever archive can be constructed, it might create political, or juridical, or even aesthetic formations along with their equivalent institutions. The archive not only serves, but helps to implement its surrounding powers in the first place. In this case, its laws, routines, and constraints turn it into a discursive mechanism of power.[3]
Štěpánka Sigmundová’s enthusiasm and obsession to collect and create an “External Memory” is the result of a disaster – a flood that hit her childhood house in June 2009. The ground floor of the house, which was also an artist’s atelier, was filled with old diaries, documents, objects, and photographs from her family. After the flood, most of these items unfortunately had to be thrown away. She managed to save some items including photographs of her great uncles who served in the RAF during WWII. After the process of washing and saving the photographs, it was obvious for Sigmundová that photography was the only trustworthy medium. As a result of this incident, Štěpánka Sigmundová started to photograph everything around her in order to create a memory for preservation. With this urge to create her own archive of visuals in a physical and digital medium, she is able to save her memories, keep them safe, and, in case of a disaster, she can start again.
View this post on Instagram(from Souvenirs/Treasure collection 1994-/) #souvenir #collection #croatia #tribunj
View this post on Instagram#Samples (from Souvenirs/Treasure collection 1994-/) #souvenir #collection #thekeeper
Sigmundová refers to Susan Sontag’s fundamental text On Photography: “To collect photographs is to collect the world.”[4] Photographing everything around her started as a self-healing process and then transformed into her artistic practice and her “External Memory” project. This project then merged with her other on-going project, “Souvenirs – Treasures” for which she has been collecting objects since 1994. Her collection of objects represents a piece of a reality, a part of her memory, a place, and an experience. They are not necessarily directly linked to her photographs in “External Memory,” but at the moment both projects are growing hand in hand. She started to catalogue and scan the objects and used museology methods to document them. To keep the objects in order, Štěpánka Sigmundová used archiving boxes to display them in the exhibition space.
View this post on Instagram
Archiving means preserving things. For Štěpánka Sigmundová, the act of archiving and creating an “External Memory” is one of expression in her artistic practice. She explores museology methods and deconstructs and reconstructs the museum. Museums are also preservers of the canon, of cultural values, and of objects that legitimize the canon. In the “National Museum: The time that remains” (2015) she de-located the National Museum in Prague to the Boccanera Temporary Gallery in Italy via her photographs that one can read as a critique of canonization that preserved and reproduced in the cultural institution. However, for Sigmundová, the exhibition shows a fascination, admiration and appreciation for the idea of the museum itself, for its purpose of preservation. How does a museum keep the artefacts and decide to present them to the audience? How are the canons created? These questions are the secondary meaning that one can interpret from the images taken at the National Museum in Prague, which is located in the middle of the highly touristic Wenceslaus Square. Štěpánka Sigmundová took these photographs during the renovation of the museum. She was the only spectator of the building and the collection – no workers, no guards, no visitors/tourists, but only the artist. She immersed herself in the spectacularity of the museum and produced a timeless collection of images, which a regular visitor would not be able to experience under ordinary conditions. Through her lens we experience a dystopic and post-apocalyptic scene embedded within a certain magnetic aura.
Sigmundová is also interested in exploring space and life outside the planet. Her exhibition “Spacegardening” (2018) was a project where she speculated on culturing in space. As she is already dealing with souvenirs, she created her series of NASA branded objects, e.g., NASA labeled vases and embroideries. Following up on this project, Štěpánka Sigmundová was inspired by the news in March 2018 that the last male white rhino, Sudan, had passed away at the age of 45. Now his daughter and granddaughter are the only two female white rhinos surviving on earth. As Latour explains in his first Gaia Lecture: “It doesn’t stop; every morning it begins all over again. One day, it’s rising water levels; the next, it’s soil erosion; by evening, it’s the glaciers melting faster and faster; on the 8 p.m. news, between two reports on war crimes, we learn that thousands of species are about to disappear before they have even been properly identified.”[5]
Sudan and his family were one of the identified species, but their extinction was executed by humans. “The Last White Rhino” (2018) is an odyssey towards preserving the body of the last male white rhino within the universe. Sigmundová’s video work starts like a science fiction film’s opening scene. It is actually a remake of the original promotional video for Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon Heavy, the first private spacecraft to carry a private passenger. It is brilliantly and sarcastically brought together to honour the body of the last white rhino: A private enterprise by SpaceX has been selected for the very last and eternal journey of the white rhino to preserve its body in space, where there is neither life nor decay.
The interest and maybe the obsession of collecting, preserving, and archiving are the core of Štěpánka Sigmundová’s art practice. She appropriates classic museology and archiving methods, and composes her works and exhibitions within a nonlinear, abstract, and fictional/non-fictional storytelling format. Her externalizing memory engages with her personal experience, life on earth, and beyond.
Text by Tuçe Erel
[1]Stefan Heidenreich, “Unknown Knowns and the Law of What Can Be Said,” in The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict, ed. Yann Chateigné et al. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 385–92. p.387.
[2]RabihMroué, “Make Me Stop Smoking-Make Me Stop Acting,” in The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict, ed. Yann Chateigné et al. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 531–38.
[3]Heidenreich, “Unknown Knowns and the Law of What Can Be Said.” P.389
[4] Susan Sontag, On Photography, electronic (New York: RosettaBooks, 2005). P.1
[5]Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017).