The California Files – Side Effects of Cultural Memory

http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/2007/californiafiles/

This exhibition, curated by Ariane Beyn, examines the reassembling of artefacts out of cultural storage systems and archives – with an eye towards the side effects of cultural memory.

The curator presents a variety of artistic works which are all based on an archival approach, be it a collection of print ephemera or an archive of African American culture.

The starting point for this exhibition is a group of California-based, self-organized archives that assemble collections of uncommon materials and process them in inventive ways. Why am I presenting this exhibition on the museum & intangible cultural heritage research platform?
Because I think it is an excellent example of sampling practices which are already existing on the internet, thus increasingly influencing the way how culture is produced and presented these days. In my opinion, museums are facing a shift not only from object to process, from the tangible to the intangible, but also from display to re-use. This is due to an ever-growing number of source materials which are stored in museums and the need to re-contextualise them. The vast storages of museums contain not only artfecats, but also stories, interviews, links and so on. I believe that in the years to come, more and more museums will have to think of ways of how to re-use what they have been storing over the course of many decades. This approach would “resist a continuous narrative or a comprehensive representation”, as Ariane Beyn writes in the introduction of the California Files catalogue.

It might be an interesting task to open museums storages to young curators and let them compile what they find in there. Maybe this would bring up interesting new approaches of how to sample tangible and intangible expressions of culture? Why is the concept of found footage mainly known in the film/video domain? I would be curious to see the results of a curatorial call for storage & archive compilations of museums worldwide.

Or has this been done already? My web search on this topic led me to the sites of found footage filmmakers, such as Craig Baldwin or Joseph Cornell. And I found an interesting blog which deals with the Recycled Cinema: http://recycledcinema.blogspot.com/

Is it true what Michael Zryd claims, that found footage filmmakers mine the unconsciuos of film? And if so, is it possible to take this approach into museums? What could we learn about our relation to the past? About the things we have inherited, about things we want to maintain and safeguard and others which we deliberately let sink into oblivion?