Book Section
Roberta Agnese
Archival Reenactement and the Role of Fiction
Walid Raad and the Atlas Group Archive
The Atlas Group created a digital mixed-media archive of contemporary Lebanese history, made up of produced and found documents. These archives look immediately ambiguous: they don’t collect historical documents; they actually contain visual artefacts created by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad. These digital mixed-media archives — partly accessible on the web but also physically exhibited and performed — are not intended to preserve the memory of the past, but they become indeed useful to actualize history by giving it back in the form of a historical fiction. What if archives should not deal with memory, but with amnesia? And what kind of historical temporality do they re-activate?
Keywords: Atlas Group; Archive; History; Memory; Photography
| Title |
Archival Reenactement and the Role of Fiction
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| Subtitle |
Walid Raad and the Atlas Group Archive
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| Author(s) |
Roberta Agnese
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| Identifier | |
| Description |
The Atlas Group created a digital mixed-media archive of contemporary Lebanese history, made up of produced and found documents. These archives look immediately ambiguous: they don’t collect historical documents; they actually contain visual artefacts created by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad. These digital mixed-media archives — partly accessible on the web but also physically exhibited and performed — are not intended to preserve the memory of the past, but they become indeed useful to actualize history by giving it back in the form of a historical fiction. What if archives should not deal with memory, but with amnesia? And what kind of historical temporality do they re-activate?
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| Is Part Of | |
| Place |
Berlin
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| Publisher |
ICI Berlin Press
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| Date |
4 January 2022
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| Subject |
Atlas Group
Archive
History
Memory
Photography
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| Rights |
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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| Language |
en-GB
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| page start |
91
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| page end |
98
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| Source |
Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, Cultural Inquiry, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 91–98
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References
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- Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)
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- Foucault, Michel, ‘The History of Sexuality’, in Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. by Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 183–94
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- Loraux, Nicole, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens, trans. by Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2006)
- Nakass, Kassandra, ‘Double Miss: On the Use of Photography in the Atlas Group Archive’, in The Atlas Group (1989–2004): A Project by Walid Raad, ed. by Kassandra Nakass and Britta Schmitz (Cologne: König, 2006), pp. 49–52
- Raad, Walid, Miraculous Beginnings (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010)
- The Atlas Group (1989–2004), artist website <https://www.theatlasgroup1989.org/> [accessed 20 January 2021]
Cite as:
Roberta Agnese, ‘Archival Reenactement and the Role of Fiction: Walid Raad and the Atlas Group Archive’, in Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, Cultural Inquiry, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 91-98 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-21_10>