The archive is a time machine that actively creates ways of accessing individual or collective experiences. Digital archives, in particular, such as the Web Museum anticipate open and free access to memories even though they are not merely a representation of events but a field in which we can surpass the informativity of events to strengthen our experience of the (unlived) past and also the future. We are not building it to remember or understand the past but to think about the future. The archive should be guided by the logic of distribution not the logic of accumulation.
Ida Hiršenfelder, “Body Archive /The Body as the Archive”, in Maska, Performing Arts Journal, year XXXV, No. 200bb, Fall 2020, Actualities, page 74–83
Editors: Pia Brezavšček and Alja Lobnik
Link to online publication in PDF: Network Museum in Slovene and English.
Editorial statement
“These issues have recently become more pronounced with the sudden urgent and increasing need to insert our technological extensions in places that used to be reserved for physical reality. The shutdown established a state of emergency that forced us to slow down, and the topic of standstill and inactivity that swept through the world thus strangely coincided with this year’s topic marking the 100 years and 200 issues of Maska. In the year marking this milestone, we are prolonging our celebration as we will issue three double 200th issues, taking our time. We are archiving and digitalising in collaboration with the Network Museum (Ida Hiršenfelder) and going back to the roots to gain a better and deeper understanding of the magazine in its actuality. Since the turning point in the 1990s, Maska is fundamentally de ned through a few characteristics detected by both articles about the magazine published in this issue (by Bojana Kunst and Aldo Milohnić). As Emil Hrvatin explicated in 2006’s Maska, the magazine has always co-existed on equal footing with other events in the theatre landscape. Juxtaposed with performances and exhibitions, it demanded eventfulness: “A magazine is a festival on paper. The more insecure and irregular its frequency, the more it feels like an event. This was Maska in the 1990s” (Hrvatin 2006, 8). Its eventfulness is directly related to understanding its place in the eld – the magazine aimed to create an eld where there is no difference between artistic and theoretical production. To create theory that does not smell of academia and allows itself to be looser and more playful in its form and content. A kind of performativity of writing – that has always been the magazine’s purpose. Maska has always been precise in re-acting limits, perceiving itself as a point of contact and confrontation between various artistic and social practices re-acting the assumptions of the medium itself. Its specific in-betweenness is an attribute that has kept it vital and permeable in all its years of operation. That is our wish for Maska: to preserve the uninhabited in-between spaces, either through internationalisation, which can open up narrow national contexts, or through transdisciplinarity, constantly questioning the limits of writing and theatre.”