MFA Exhibition by Igor Arume

PUBLISHING AS TACTIC: TOWARD A COUNTER-ARCHIVE PRACTICE

For the last three years, our eyes and screens have been bombarded by images of rubble—cities, infrastructure, monuments, people engulfed by debris. In a world where photography is ubiquitous and a camera can be found in every person's pocket, the archive has turned into the greatest paradigm of contemporaneity: what is to be done with the billions of images generated every day?

In this show, I propose a counter-archive practice that challenges the authority, authorship, and ownership of the institutional apparatus represented by archives, museums, libraries, and universities. I present a strategy of engagement through publishing (but not in the traditional publishing realm): an experimental approach rooted in the revolutionary ethos, where publishing is a structure that facilitates collective communication and organization. Like the scaffolding around a building under construction, it is both provisional and in permanent motion: affordable, modular, adaptable, a metaphor for in(ter)dependent (rather than “independent”)artist publishing.

The show presents a body of work that displays my critical engagement with different archives: leaked classified photos and military documents of a UFO investigation in Brazil; the educational debris from a university's archaeology department collected at a book sale; images from the online British Museum collection; and discarded thesis books found in the trash.

The modular bookshelf that holds my personal collection of books about books and archives invites visitors to use the accompanying printer to make copies of pages from these texts and compile their own zines, readers, and printed ephemera.

We live surrounded by the ruins of past and current empires. The way power manifests in our societies and everyday lives is oftentimes invisible. We must therefore understand the world to change it. 

-Igor Arume, M.Des. (he/him) 3rd year MFA student