Open Archief: Unlocking the potential of creative reuse
What happens when artists and archives meet? A simple exchange of information where one will give and the other will take? Or will it give rise to something more?
The answers to these questions are reflected in ‘Open Archief, Artistic Reuse of Archives’, a new book that brings together the voices of artists, curators, and researchers who highlight the insights that creative reuse have brought forth within their practice. The book demonstrates how the interaction between artists and archivists supports new thinking around the notion of what an archive is, can or should be, and enables reflection on creating new ways of perceiving not only the past, but also the way we will safeguard the future.
The book comes from a long-running project called Open Archief. Open Archief is a multifaceted, collaborative project that explores the potential of what can be inspired by making archival material accessible to artists for creative reuse. It is run by three Dutch heritage institutions - Sound & Vision, Nieuwe Instituut and the International Institute of Social History - and supported by Stichting Archief Publicaties and the Pictoright Fund.
After five years and multiple artists in residencies, workshops and clinics (participatory lectures), the Open Archief project team sought a way to showcase the outcomes of the various aspects of the Open Archief programme in a more concrete way: a collection of essays. With the help of many inspiring contributors ‘Open Archief - Artistic Reuse of Archives’ (2024) was created.
The book
The book consists of 12 visual and text-based essays, and paints a picture of archival reuse by artists and how they relate (themselves) to archives and archival institutions. In doing so, the project firstly wants to demonstrate to the archival community, and anyone else, that archive reuse is co-creation. Secondly, it intends to inspire readers to actively choose to work with archives: the essays in this publication provide many examples and avenues to explore. Finally, the publication is aimed at a wider audience interested in art and archives. With the book, the Open Archief project team hopes to offer insight into the dynamics at play between archive and user.
Creative reuse
What exactly does it mean for an artist to ‘reuse’ an archive? It can encompass collaging and editing old photographs to explore historical events, to juxtaposing, recontextualising and adding different layers to heritage materials to dive into deeper conversations. Instead of looking at archives as a distant, quiet place that promotes a static repository of history, reuse creates a space for interaction, collaboration and even co-creating.
This is not just a theoretical exercise. The artists featured in this book share tangible examples of how they’ve worked with archives to create new narratives, challenge assumptions, and spark conversations. All essays provide glimpses into their processes and offer insights that could inspire any professional, whether you’re an artist, archivist, or someone working in-between.
For example, the essay ‘REWIND / REPLAY’ by susan pui san lok takes the reader on a journey through her research of the archive of the Gate Foundation and the creation of the sound installation/performance REWIND/REPLAY, 2022. The installation consists of music stands, microphones, speakers and hundreds of metres of video tapes and written scores that hold many curated sound and text fragments of the archive. The piece invites the audience to dive into a cacophony of text and sounds, activating the scores presented to them, but first and foremost to listen to it all. Going against traditional archivist methodology, susan pui san lok focuses - both in her research and installation - on the ambiguous grey spaces in archives and collections. She pays attention to un-inventorised documents and objects with cryptic, illegible or lost labels. And also to the unsaid, the unspoken and the intimated between the words. Within her research, she moves beyond the need for ‘completeness’ in an archive, and remarks that every record is always already ‘a partial representation or account’, acknowledging not only the limited representation of particular perspectives within the collection, but also creating awareness of the perspective of the audience/archivist.
The essay ‘This Forest was made to be Bombed’ by Shock Forest Group challenges the notion of what can be seen as an archive - and reused - altogether. Within the essay the sonic research collective writes about the Shock Forest, or ‘Schokbos’ in Dutch, a former military test site consisting of a man-made forest near a former state-owned munitions company in the Netherlands. The collective took up an artist-in-residence near the forest and was resolved to investigate its history and legacy. Instead of turning to old paperwork, terrain maps and other conventional archival materials, they focussed on the trees, the ground and the sounds they housed, placing them into the role of witnesses that bare scars, give testimonies and simply die. By looking at the past through the eyes of non-human entities and their relation to our shared history, the Shock Forest Group asks us to re-evaluate what can or should be considered an archive.
