“Let’s distribute the cultural archives instead of the corona virus!”
Dealing with current situation in the time of social distancing due to COVID-19 pandemic, Cemeti – Institute for Art and Society will run a new casual project called sebARSIP.
In this project, we utilize the most of our online media platforms, such as Instagram @cemeti.institute and our new website www.cemeti.art. We will share a weekly review on materials of documentation from our archives related to artworks or projects of artists that had ever collaboratively worked with Cemeti, it can be one post or more. It will be divided into some rubrics based on the types, contents and related-programs of the documentation archive we think interesting to share. It can be a review of artwork-related archives, project-or-event-related archives, or residency-program-specific archives, or just text-based archives.
The sebARSIP is not intended as a mere time-filler, of course! This project is one of our important agendas that aims to continue our contribution to the dynamics of production and distribution of cultural knowledge. All of the review posts in this project will be framed within a curatorial series. The curatorial topic for any set of reviews will certainly not be burdened by the rumble of COVID-19, although there are many chances to reflect the crisis of the global health protection system today through several projects or artworks had been produced or exhibited at Cemeti. Any interpretation is possible; to reframe them from a contemporary point of view is worth putting forward.
Nayia Yiakoumaki Georgia, in her doctoral thesis “Curating Archives, Archiving Curating” (2009), argues that curating the archive can “…alter the constitution of the archive, as well as the subsequent interpretations of its material…” in the future. In addition, she said that “… curator’s interventions in the archive should be re-deposited within it as a means for the archive’s potential expansion.”
Agree with her argument and see it as one of the theoretical reasons behind the sebARSIP project, we believe that to give intervention to the Cemeti’s archival collection via the practice of curating content on social media will trigger their metaphysical aspects, especially if we do so with the awareness that social media is not merely a channel of information, but also a “medium of utterance” potential to uncover the possibility of “metaarchive”.
Rather than merely present with “editorial” technique, articulating the re-reading of Cemeti’s archival collection through a curatorial approach—as well as to regenerate curator’s intervention in the archives to be spread—is expected to represent the progressivity in evoking archive’s speculative segments that are open to anyone who wants to pick some fragments of the small historiography of arts in our society.
Manshur Zikri
Curator
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Project Coordinator: Dimaz Maulana | Content Curator: Manshur Zikri | Archivists: Muhammad Dzulqarnain, Ika Nurcahyani,& Tri Mukti Yuliana |Translator: Diyan Krisnawati
CEMETI 