SEZGIN BOYNIK

We are indifferent towards the official archive because often the research projects and artistic works evolving around it reproduce a certain conservative “mystique”, or aura of the old and unique. The archives, partly because of their being pillars of the bourgeoisie and of their state constitutions, usually give inspiration for ideas that are unbearably conservative, mediocre, and reactionary. In this ahistorical set up of conservative archival institutions, the documents are springboards for imagination, and, often for very predictable and conservative imaginations. You can recognize these people, and the many artists in their ranks, who are inspired not necessarily by what is written in these documents but by their very smell, by the dust. As Jaques Le Goff, someone who had a particular aversion towards archival “mystique”, noted that in the ahistorical world of bourgeois research the archival documents serve the “poetic stimulus, which begins even before the document is read, thanks to the creative force with which the sacred space of archive is imbued”. The results of these artistic projects are surrealistic caricatures of smelling, worshipping, and lots of dancing with archives; looking at the dust of history to discover familiar traits, recognizable fantasies, ordinary stories, and their own comfort. This is a world of the conservative and bourgeois imagination, of history that we do not like to discover in archives.