On the occasion of Archive/ Counter Archive Conference we met Australian artist Tom Nicholson, whose research can be framed within the debate around the relationship between contemporary art and the archive.
This relation, as his work, adresses some important issues: memory and identity, amnesia, access, imaginary, truth, narrative and history.
Tom Nicholson, After action for another library, 2007.
Taking Lines towards another century - the work born out of the collaboration with composer Andrew Byrne - as a point of departure, we have talked about the archive as a responsible way of reading history and the present, beyond nostalgia and any form of monumentalization of the past.
We have also talked about lines, borders, lists, about the link between the act of drawing and the creation of national bounderies and about the ambivalent nature of archives as tools of unity and political consistency and as repository of discontinuities and opposite forces.
Tom Nicholson - with Andrew Byrne - Lines toward another century, Venezia, 2010.