Archive Species—Bodies, Habits, Practices

Buchpräsentation / Vortrag / Interview
Bernhard Cella im Gespräch mit Joke Robaard und Camiel van Winkel 
Vortrag in englischer Sprache

Archive Species ist eine kritische Untersuchung zur Darstellung von bekleideten Körpern in Printmedien seit den 1970er Jahren. Die Künstlerin Joke Robaard und der Schriftsteller Camiel van Winkel haben das umfangreiche Archiv von Mode- und Zeitungsbildern, das Robaard seit 1979 gesammelt hat, neu zusammengestellt und gelesen. Gemeinsam wählten sie Bilder aus dem Archiv aus und ordneten sie zu dynamischen Serien oder Zyklen neuer Erzählungen und unerwarteter Handlungsstränge. Mit einer künstlerischen Strategie der Aneignung und Entfremdung identifizieren die Autoren entscheidende Verbindungen zwischen Körper, Objekt und Verhalten, um die verborgenen kulturellen und politischen Schichten der Modefotografie aufzudecken.

Archive Species is a critical inquiry into the representation of clothed bodies in print media since the 1970s. Artist Joke Robaard and writer Camiel van Winkel have been re-assembling and re-reading the vast archive of fashion and newspaper images that Robaard has collected since 1979. Together they selected images from the archive and arranged them into dynamic series or cycles, generating new narratives and unexpected pathways of signification. Using an artistic strategy of appropriation and alienation, the authors identify crucial connections between body, object, and behaviour, in an elaborate attempt to expose the hidden cultural and political layers of fashion photography.
 
Joke Robaard (*1953) is an artist/researcher, who teaches at the TxT department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. In 2016 her video Small Things That Can Be Lined Up was presented within the program Event and Duration by If I Can't Dance, Amsterdam. In November (2018) an overview of her work is shown at Club Solo, Breda. Recent exhibitions include: Mind Fabric, Institut de Carton, Brussels (2016), Assemblage, a project with Camiel van Winkel, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam (2016); Get Real/Real Self, Museum of Modern Art Arnhem (2011); Does it Work. How does it work? Opera Aperta, the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Venice (2011) and Social Fabric: Model and the Other, MUHKA, Antwerp (2009).
 
Camiel van Winkel writes on contemporary art and cinema, and occasionally curates exhibitions. He teaches at LUCA School of Arts/Sint-Lukas Brussels. He is the author of various books: Moderne leegte. Over kunst en openbaarheid (1999), The Regime of Visibility (2005), The Myth of Artisthood (2007/2013), and During the Exhibition the Gallery Will Be Closed. Contemporary Art and the Paradoxes of Conceptualism (Valiz, 2012).

Archive Species - Bodies, Habits, Practices
Authors: Joke Robaard & Camiel van Winkel, Design: Elisabeth Klement
paperback | 488pp. English, 2018, Valiz

Bernhard Cella is an Austrian artist with an interest in current forms of visual art, which shift modes of production and distribution. Temporary settings mirror real services. In 2007 he founded the "Salon für Kunstbuch“ in Vienna, "an enterprise as artwork." According to Cella it functions as a kind of model-space on a 1:1 scale, in which changing relationships among objects, people and artworks can unfold being entirely non-economical. (2011-2019, Belvedere 21) In a complex conceptual approach Cella explores artistic entrepreneurship and the changing role of artists in society.