Hidden layers. Archives and data management (2020)
Remembrance and archives are closely related concepts. Remembrance itself is often characterised as an archive: a repository of things, pictures and meanings, a warehouse which may take material form, even though remembrance is much more like transmission, the sum of processes through which the past reaches us. In the autumn term of academic year 2020-21, we devoted the design assignment of first year students of the Media design master’s programme to the “Archives” topic and the cooperation with Blinken OSA, in order for students to interpret the period of the cold war, which is difficult to approach and burdened with taboos, through a research process based on authentic sources. With the guidance of educators Miklós Erhardt and Krisztina Erdei, we examined in general the importance of archives in shaping historical awareness and in contemporary art and culture, and we also analysed the specific background information related to the OSA. We invited the staff members of OSA and other professionals who have rekindled our relationship with the archives through their work. Our guests included Lívia Páldi, curator of an exhibition at Kunsthalle Budapest, titled BBS 50: OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS – ATTEMPT(S) AT RECONSTRUCTION, Fifty years of Balázs Béla Studio, seeking to reconstruct the history and collections of the studio, artist Marcell Esterházy, who often relies on personal and collective memories and the connections between them in his work, as well as ethnographer Zsófia Frazon, associate of the Museum of Ethnography and leader of a scientific project titled Open Museum, who has organised many intriguing cooperations in order to share the materials of museums and archives with the wider public. Parallel to theory-focused seminars, students started independent project development led by János Szirtes and Kálmán Tarr, in order to create informative and authentic visual contents by observing and creatively interpreting the materials of the archive.
In the last thirty years, contemporary art took an active part in reimagining the connections between remembrance and oblivion, identity and history, and the history-shaping role of archives as media. The exhibitions devoted to the theme of the archive and the archive materials appropriated and disarranged by artists revealed that the meaning of pictures and texts is heavily influenced by the way that we categorise and structure them. A document in the archive receives the prestige of an instrument suitable for describing society and becomes the sovereign analogy of identity, remembrance and history. Contents organised into folders make way for a wider context, determining which gives great responsibility to the organiser because documents do not always reveal only what seems evident at first sight. The aim of the artistic exercise dealing with the research of remembrance and archives is to save personal and collective memories from oblivion, which are irrelevant for official remembrance but still important in another sense, and to publish them in a new kind of interpretative framework.
The one-semester programme was challenging even beyond the restrictions of the pandemic, primarily for students who encountered the wide-ranging, rich materials of a historical period which they haven’t directly experienced, but which is still relatively close in time and insufficiently settled. This confronted many of them with the question of competence, which made it difficult for them to find their own aspect of research. The completion of almost every project was preceded by reorientation, error, obstruction, torment or confrontation. We think that this process itself and the results were equally important parts of the semester’s work.
