Addressing the question of the archive does not mean turning our back to the present according to a teleological diachronical perspective, but on the contrary it would mean to analyze how knowledge and technology that define the range of the contemporary visuality are in turn defined by a “historical a-priori” (Foucault) in which they find their own conditions of possibility. An “a-priori” is co-extensive with the present: it is not meant to be searched as an already-given object somewhere in the past, but it is rather something that needs to be synchronically constructed, connected and organized through a genealogical practice toward the future.

In the past few years many experiences in fine arts, cinema, philosophy etc. have turned their attention towards the concept of the archive and in general towards practices of the paratactic juxtaposition of elements: as if a new experience of the historical time was emerging. The digital culture, for instance, along with the new possibilities of organization and recording of knowledge connected to it, open up new perspectives of construction and access of knowledge based on modularity and a-hierarchical horizontality more than on a vertical discipline. Or in the field of the visual studies, a renewed attention toward figures like Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin testimony an intellectual sensibility focused on the relationship between image, memory and historical time.

We would therefore like to refer to the associations opened up by the concept of the archive in its expanded declination. Archive is the discursive and yet physical place where dialectical and conflictual negotiations between genealogical practices and dispositifs of power find their place to be. And where what’s at stake is nothing less than the form and modalities to access the present regime of the visual.

Institutions, knowledge, dispositifs. Which institutions, knowledge, dispositifs of power define and organize the condition of possibility of the contemporary visual? Which agents, subjects, norms and conditions of access are legitimized or made illegitimate?

The Digital Archive. How do the modalities of registration and preservation made possible by the digital turn redefine archival practices and the organization of knowledge? The pervasive possibility of filming, recording, decoding, archiving – with very low costs and easily accessible technologies – which kind of relation does it establish with temporality, history and memory?

Memory, image, historical time. Are images examples of a recorded and archived past? Are the enormous archives of images an example of a technological preservation of memory? Or rather does their supposed accuracy and adherence hide blanks spots, silences, missing elements? What does an image say or does not say? Would it be possible to imagine a politics of images which does not delegate a testimony but rather takes on the  responsibility of doing so to its most extreme consequences?

Archive and its subject. How is it possible to make an archive speak? Which is the subject (institution or ideology) that is entitled to make it speak? Are we a constituent subject (active) of an archive or are we subjected (passive) to it and to the way through which an archive is shaping the conditions of the possibility of the visual?

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