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eBook details

• Title: Archiving the Potentialities of Events.
• Author : English Studies in Canada
• Release Date : January 01, 2004
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 191 KB

Description

CONSTRUCTING AN ARCHIVE exclusively for events that can happen--regardless of whether or not they ever will or actually ever did happen--is also to challenge the limits of what an archive can do. Since 1999, the Lebanese artist Walid Raad has done just that. His project The Atlas Group Archive still documents, researches and produces a contemporary history of the Lebanese civil wars that ravaged Lebanon between 1975 and 1991. In their exhibitions, The Atlas Group Archive claims, like any other archive, that the objects on display constitute factual evidence of past events. "Ibis is in no sense untrue, but as I will suggest in more detail, the most striking experience when attending their exhibitions is the realization that the documents represent not actual past events but potential ones. I will argue that the archive's artefacts and explanatory texts produce historical paradoxes in such a way that these are capable of documenting the historical potentialities of events. As Raad himself explained in an interview: "The documents in this imaginary archive do not so much document 'what happened: but what can be imagined, what can be said, taken for granted, what can appear as rational or not, as thinkable and sayable about the civil wars" (Raad 2001). In short, The Atlas Group organizes an archive for potentialities that only appeared historically after the wars. in this article, I will describe and analyze what structural features are required of such an archive. The Atlas Group Archive collects and displays physical things. Yet its collection amounts to an archive of potentialities. This is in itself remarkable, since the distinction between things and potentialities is fundamental. Their separation is ontological, which means that the way things are is completely different from the way potentialities are. It was Aristotle who introduced this fundamental difference into philosophy. (1) He argued that if a potentiality were said to be, in the same way that a thing is, one would confuse the being of a thing with the being of that which enables a thing to be the way it is. Aristotle also said that, unlike a thing, a potentiality can exist without manifesting itself as an actual being: one can be able to do a thing without ever doing it, showing it or even knowing about it.

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