Mariana Lanari: Catching Up in the Archive

Catching Up in the Archive is an exhibition showcasing the evolving infrastructure of de Appel Archive. Displaying more than 16,000 objects in the Aula, de Appel’s exhibition space in Amsterdam, and launching an interactive online environment, Catching Up in the Archive stages unprecedented activations, public gatherings and ear-opening encounters.

In a daring move, artist Mariana Lanari (São Paulo, 1976) relocates the extensive Archive into the Aula, rearranging all its objects, along with the work-stations of the Archive’s team. Lanari’s deliberate spatial intervention goes in tandem with the implementation of customised digital technologies developed by Archival Consciousness: mobile archive units (a.k.a “Silverfish”) that identify archival objects and instantly display them on bibliograph, the exhibition’s online environment.

Through a hands-on approach, these novel applications are put to work by visitors, special guests and accidental passers-by, who are invited to browse, read and annotate items of their own choosing. By doing so, visitors acquire the know-how of the Archive’s infrastructure while, at the same time, participating in shaping de Appel’s dynamic and growing online collections. Visitors are welcome to permute the physical arrangement of books in the Aula. They can reorganise them, change their location and create their own curated stacks.

Throughout the exhibition, de Appel Archive will catch up with local and international artists, curators, researchers, partners and sister institutions by inviting them to be table guests. The table guests will spend a day in the Aula using the Silverfish to highlight topics they are researching and objects they are intrigued by.

The temporary relocation of de Appel Archive evokes the memories of de Appel’s various rehousing. These rehousing were formative junctures to the Archive’s workers, informing their conception of the Archive as a shared construction site, one that requires ongoing spatial, conceptual, and discursive explorations.

In the same vein, Catching Up in the Archive catches up with visitors who, with every action they take, intervene on what the archive may become. This also results in a catching up with digital technologies and their unexplored potential. Catching Up in the Archive is a pivotal step towards realizing de Appel Archive’s greater vision: Spaces-Run-Archive, which aims at transforming the Archive into a nomadic, mobile archive that can travel the world to meet other archives.

About the artist
Mariana Lanari is an artist, co-founder of Archival Consciousness, and Ph.D. candidate at the Amsterdam School of Heritage, Memory, and Material Cultures, University of Amsterdam. Lanari’s practice is invested in studying and intervening in processes of physical and digital mediation in cultural libraries and archives. Catching Up in the Archive is the outcome of Lanari’s long-term collaboration with De Appel and her research into the design and development of customised applications of semantic and graph technology applications that are sensitive to the institution’s history and the existing relational database. Lanari’s visionary and socially committed practice has been recognised both in the Netherlands and internationally.The exhibition builds on her ongoing research projects, previously presented at Casa do Povo, São Paulo, in 2019 and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 2015–2016.

Archival Consciousness
Archival Consciousness was initiated in 2019 by artist Mariana Lanari and graphic designer Remco van Bladel. They are interested in the long term preservation and dissemination of cultural libraries and archives, and to investigate new publishing methods taking the database as a starting point. Lanari and Van Bladel have been awarded the MediaFutures grant in the framework of EU Horizon 2020, the Route Kunst support and from the NWA/NWO, Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie, among others.