The failed archive

Abstract

This thesis project is divided into an artistic component that consists of the set-up Installing Allusions that was a part of the MFA graduation exhibition Kuvan Kevät 2022 and a written component which is a separate publication project titled The Failed Archive. While Installing Allusions is conceived as process of material becoming of a series of discursive practices which mainly focused on the process of re-materialization in the formulation of objects and bodies, and through using exhibition-making as a medium when formulating an archive of discourses, The Failed Archive attempts to continue this materialization of discursive practices in the form of writing and publication. It consists of two texts titled Archive Practice - System of knowledge, Failures, and Discourses and Installing Allusions Revisited - Memory, Body, Material, and Folds. Separately, through re-accounting the formation of system of knowledge and its inherent problems, and a fictional revisiting of Installing Allusions that bonds the set-up with its process of making with personal memory, sensation, observations, and self-conversations in the form of experimental writing, the two texts stand as a theoretical frame-work of the discourses and serves as an index to the archive practice that both Installing Allusions and Archive of Failures attempt to carry out together.

As a further elaboration, of the discourses of archive and its rematerialization are also embodied within the graphic design intervention of the publication - as in Installing Allusions Revisited - Memory, Body, Material, and Folds an experimental technique of writing that creates folds as ramifications of the main texts was used, therefore the reader is invited to constantly choose their own reading path - the folding structure of the papers is specially conceived in order to contain this intersectionality of the reading process.