Open Archive # 1: Trajectories in Audio-Visual Culture :: until November 10, 2007 :: Argos - Centre for Art & Media, Werfstraat 13 Rue du Chantier, Brussels 1000, Belgium :: 32 2 2290003 :: info at argosarts.org

The archive is often thought of as a forgotten repository of faded documents and dusty objects: it is an image of and from the past, a mundane picture whose identity is slowly transforming into a dynamic, digitally coloured notion of storage and memory. The archive, as an innovative concept, need not embody the past as such, but rather the promise of the past into the future. Its essence is to be found in the way it addresses yesterday’s potential, opening up to the unknown, the unexpected and unpredictable, and to a new future.

With that in mind Argos opens its doors and its archive with the project Open Archive #1. Argos’ extensive collections are both a starting-point for genealogy and archaeology, as well as sparking off a multitude of associations and correlations. From the numerous media works, catalogues and publications several trajectories can be drawn, and diverse frames of reference for reflections on culture, art, media and society today can be created. In this way the archive is used as a public space, which does not merely take stock of the past and classify it, but reinterprets and re-activates it as well.

Dealing with a collection in a dynamic way opens up new possibilities: it is both a quest through memory, as well as one for content and contextual correlations. The numerous programme segments during Open Archive #1 do not merely highlight Argos’ points of strength - the domain of audio-visual art - they also present new perspectives and challenges. A varied and lively complementary programme of lectures, performances, concerts, screenings and artists’ presentations has been planned to create a discursive space which negotiates some of the key questions in audio-visual culture today.

Open Archive #1 will also feature Re:Collections, a series of presentations of Argos’ new acquisitions 2005-2007. This will include over 90 single channel video works which were selected (following an open call from Argos to curators, art critics, museum directors, and several art professionals in Belgium) by a jury consisting of Marc Glöde (Dept. of Film Studies, Freie Universite, Berlin), Katerina Gregos (Argos), Brent Klinkum (Transat Video, Caen), Berta Sichel (Dept. of Audio Visual Art, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid) and Paul Willemsen (Argos). These video works will be made publicly available alongside Argos’ new acquisitions for distribution and/or the media library, and projected at set times in the Black Box.

Aside from the presentation of the new acquisitions and premieres of new films and videos by Orla Barry, Steve Reinke, Hans Op de Beeck and Peter Downsbrough, there will be two screening programmes, Out of Place: Performing the Everyday curated by artist Vincent Meessen and Up to/and Including the Limits curated by Katerina Gregos. The first programme brings together a series of contemporary artists’ films which make use of vehicles and their imagery as instruments or rhetorical figures while the second presents works by artists who are concerned with the performative mapping of space.

During the six weeks of Open Archive #1 there will also be a dynamic programme of side events including a number of lectures and conferences such as Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube moderated by Geert Lovink and featuring a number of internationally acclaimed speakers such as Nora Barry, Lev Manovich and Adrian Miles. Other conferences include Media, Memory and the Archive moderated by Marleen Wynants, with Steve Dietz, Oliver Grau, and Richard Rinehart.

A series of individual lectures under the general title Cinema in Transit has also been planned. Speakers include Philippe-Alain Michaud, Mark Nash, Laura Mulvey, Peter Weibel, and Jean-Christophe Royoux. Kevin E. Consey, Director of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film, will also give a lecture on New Directions in Digital Media and the Moving Image.

The concert series planned for Open Archive #1 features Asmus Tietchens + Thomas Köner, John Duncan, Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Tetuzi Akiyama + Jozef van Wissem, Mattin + Junko + Michel Henritzi, Charles Curtis, and Lucio Capece.

A seminar on the Documentation and Archiving of Media Arts (co-produced with Packed) is also scheduled featuring, among others, Alain Depocas, Agathe Jarczyk, and Christoph Blasco.

Artists’ presentations include an evening with Johan Grimonprez in conversation with Dirk De Wit (IAK/IBK) and a presentation of the Brussels-based artists’ group Auguste Orts in conversation with Katerina Gregos (Argos) and Benjamin Cook (LUX).

One of the highlights of the programme will be screenings and performances by the legendary Tony Conrad and Ken Jacobs (co-produced with BOZAR Cinema) on the 13/14th October and 20/21st October respectively. The numerous side events that will take place as part of Open Archive #1 are curated by Katerina Gregos and Stoffel Debuysere.

Finally, Argos will, during this time, also be presenting a new publication entitled The Residents. The book, which has been conceived as a kind of collective artists’ book, brings together 46 foreign artists who live and work in Brussels, most of whom have devised new projects especially for the occasion. The book aims both to present a selective overview of the significant number of foreign artists living in Brussels, through specially conceived projects, but also tries to capture the distinct psycho-geography of Brussels — a city with an ambiguous and elusive image - as seen through the unique perspective of the artists. The book is instigated and edited by Katerina Gregos, and features texts by Aaron Schuster and the editor. It will be launched at the opening of the Open Archive project on the 29th September.