Casa del Lago
Mexico City
2013
Artists:
Ariella Azoulay
Eusebio Bañuelos
Diego Berruecos
Guillaume Désanges
galería perdida
Thomas Hirschhorn
Leo Marz
(English and Spanish)
Press:
Letras Libres
TODA LA MEMORIA DEL MUNDO
The digital revolution has been accompanied by radical changes in our means of approaching and relating to what surrounds us. The constant flow of generated information has so extensively modified our experience of reality that the digital realm appears not only as technology but also as a sociocultural phenomenon determining the world’s present condition.
The superposition of real and virtual spaces has resulted in a paradigm change from which cultural production is not exempt. In light of the vast quantity of information provided and promoted by the web, the consumption, access, dissemination, and control of information has taken center stage. Originality, one of the values most prized by modernity, has become obsolete on the new cultural horizon. Inspired to a certain extent by the concept of unoriginal genius as formulated by Marjorie Perloff, which refers to a creator whose work does not focus on producing, but rather on giving meaning to what already exists, this exhibition collects a series of works which the common gesture is selection.
This change of direction in artistic production – selecting instead of creating – has blurred the boundaries separating the work of artists, curators, and researchers: given the overabundance of information, its consumption, and its easy reproduction within the digital world, they use decidedly similar working and research methodologies. Nonetheless, although the very idea of selection implies a world in which information circulates freely, what happens when what one wishes to select is altogether absent?
To confront this predicament, the artists assembled here have displayed increasingly complex investigation methods, ones that fight, perhaps, against what the French philosopher Jacques Derrida identified as the death drive threatening the archive; that is, the self-destructive tendency in archiving. The exhibition takes its name from the visual essay carried out in 1956 by the French filmmaker Alain Resnais, which follows the entire process a printed material undergoes on entering the National Library of France. Symptomatically, his script and images emphasize the excessive production and storage of what will, in all likelihood, be condemned to oblivion.