What unfolds when an archive is reopened 30 years later?

A conversation between Gian Paolo Minelli, artist of 1995 Archives, and Cintia Mezza, specialist in the management and preservation of artists’ archives.

The event consists of two moments: a first part with presentations and dialogue in the conference room, followed by a guided walkthrough of the exhibition galleries.

During the conversation, the broad question will be addressed: What do artists keep? And, by extension: Can everything that is kept be considered an “archive”?

They will share technical aspects of the practice of archiving and un-archiving, guided by key concepts and prompts: the archive as a latent form, and its opening or access as a curatorial gesture; the temporal context of 1990s art and the persistence of the negative against the ephemerality of digital images; the portrait as a form of collaboration between people and devices in the 21st century; and visual memory alongside art history as modes of time that revisit archives—capsules captured in images, faces, and bodies, one’s own or others’.

The discussion will also explore the construction of collective memory from intimate gestures, and how personal archives shift between privacy and exposure. Finally, it will address the management and preservation of posthumous archives—legacies that become either successions or silences—and the technologies of images, from negatives to cell phones: loss or excess?

In times of infinite photos and selfies, what will we forget? A contemporary question that challenges us as a community.

Recommended for visual artists, photographers, curators, cultural managers, and anyone interested in organizing, preserving, and providing access to a photographic archive.

This activity has a fee and requires prior registration through the following form:

Cintia Mezza is a specialist in Collection, Archive, and Artists’ Legacies Management. She holds a degree in Art History (UBA), a Postgraduate Diploma in NGO Management (UdeSA), and has training in photography, conservation, and archival studies through the international programs Arts Administration (Guggenheim–NYU) and the Executive Education Program for Museum Leaders (Getty Institute). She was an Ibermuseos Fellow (Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, 2019); Director of Programming and Curatorial Affairs at Fundación PROA (2013–19); and Collection Management Coordinator at MALBA (2001–12). Currently, she is Manager of the KLEMM Collection, its Archive, and Public Programs, and serves as Director of the Diploma Program in Management and Conservation of Arts Archives (UNSAM). She also teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses at several universities and works as an independent advisor on artists’ legacies, including those of Mirtha Dermisache, Alicia Penalba, Marta Minujín, León Ferrari, María Luisa Bemberg, and Nicolás García Uriburu, among others.

We thank the Embassy of Switzerland in Argentina for their support in carrying out this activity.