Suely Rolnik : Archivmanie

In recent decades, the art world's interest in archives has increased steadily, developing into a true "compulsion to archive." In her text, Suely Rolnik describes the root of this tendency in Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, and focusing on the countries of Latin America that were under military dictatorships. She sees one explanation for this in "unconscious colonial repression," which, like the dictatorial regimes in these countries, left behind a far-reaching trauma and led to a split between the poetic and the political, widened through the misunderstandings of "official" art history, which interprets the artistic practices that are found there in terms of a "political" or "ideological" Conceptual art. Against this background erupts the will to turn toward the archives anew and reactivate the fusion of poetic and political forces.Suely Rolnik is a psychoanalyst, curator, and cultural theorist based in Brazil.