Archives are often imagined as dusty, cumbersome and, all in all, dead collections of old artefacts. Yet, as I have come to understand, they have a pulse—a beating, a bubbling at the source. An archive can be many things, but, to me, it offers two central possibilities: an insight into the past and a making of the future. These two are deeply entangled with the now—our now.
Taking inspiration from Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway, I have come to understand that the archive is not simply an installation that transports traces from the past into the present, so that they may subsequently be carried into the future. Things are not that simple. In Archive Fever (1996), Jacques Derrida offers an alternative:
“The question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in times to come, later on or perhaps never.”
— Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (1996), p. 36
The archive is not linear. Temporalities collide. It is a material-discursive configuration in which past, present and future are continuously implicated in one another. The archive re-members. It continuously recounts memories through processes of reconfiguration—a lens through which we can reconsider what we think we know.
However, that lens may bend our view. The archive is never complete. It does not exist as an autonomous trace of a completed past, subsequently interpreted in the present. Nor is the archivist neutral: their decisions about classification and preservation matter in determining what can become visible. The archivist does not stand outside the archive as a neutral mediator between the past and the researcher. The archivist, the record, the catalogue, the technologies of preservation and the researcher are all part of the same material-discursive configuration. The archive lives.
This is what sparked my interest in archiving some years ago. After discussing it with some friends, I decided to contact the Flemish Centre for Art Archives (CKV). They, in turn, connected me with the Walter & Nicole Leblanc Foundation, where I interned over the summer. The foundation was started by Nicole Leblanc herself, some years after her husband Walter was tragically killed in a car accident on his way to the setup of a group exhibition in Brussels. As I imagine it, she carefully collected, organised and classified his belongings, gradually forming an archive—one, like many archives, born out of love.
In a way, the archive is much like fiction: both are for “collecting, carrying, and telling the stuff of living” (Donna Haraway in Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986, p. 10). Nicole was trying to tell her husband’s story. And it showed. Throughout my internship, I mostly digitised and classified correspondence between Walter (& Nicole) Leblanc and countless other correspondents, ranging from gallerists and museum directors to fellow artists. Most interestingly, he wrote to all of them as friends. I was touched by his attentiveness, and by the sweet greetings he would leave at the bottom of his letters. Perhaps it was a sign of the times, but it is something I can hardly imagine nowadays. In any case, I felt that throughout the internship I was gradually constructing an idea of him—of who he might have been. I was able to listen to and watch audio and video footage of him discussing his practice and work, as well as peek into and re-sort his library. I placed his books in chronological order and perused them as I worked. Many of the gallerists Leblanc corresponded with—the very people whose letters I was archiving—had published books featuring his work. This was not coincidental, yet it was surprising to encounter so many names I recognised.
All these things connected and overlapped. Slowly, an impression formed. More than that, I feel I got to know the artist. I was offered an insight, but I was also actively participating in its construction. I was able to share this insight, too. I helped exhibit parts of the archive and library on the new website of the foundation. In doing so, I came to see the website as another layer of the archive: not simply a digital container for materials, but a new space in which materials are selected, organised and given meaning. Through this process, Leblanc can be encountered again.
What I take away from this experience is the following: the past is never simply lost, nor is it dead. It can be remembered in a multitude of ways, and every act of remembering inevitably transforms what is remembered. The archive does not simply preserve what was; it participates in what can become. In sorting, classifying, digitising, listening, reading and looking, I was not merely uncovering Walter Leblanc. I was, in some small way, helping to produce a version of him—a version that could be encountered by me, and that might later be encountered by someone else.
Perhaps this is where the pulse of the archive lies. Not in the dust of the documents, nor even in the documents themselves, but in the relations they allow to emerge. A letter connects Walter to a gallerist; a book connects him to an artist, an exhibition, a particular moment in time. None of these things exists entirely on its own. They gather meaning through their relations, and those relations are never fixed. They shift depending on who encounters them, what they are looking for and what questions they bring with them.
The archive does not give us Walter Leblanc back. It gives us possibilities for encountering him.
It reaches forward.
And perhaps this is what Derrida means when he places the archive so firmly in the future. We cannot know in advance what an archive will come to mean, because its meaning is produced through future encounters. The archive is a promise of sorts: that something might be found, remembered, reconsidered. It does not simply hold the past. It re-members it, again and again, in the present, while opening it towards futures we cannot yet know.
Walter Leblanc (1932–1986) was an important Belgian figure in European post-war art. Over the course of his career, he developed an extremely coherent oeuvre centred on the staging of light without artifice or disruptive elements. Within the international neo-avant-garde networks of Nouvelle Tendance, ZERO, Op art, kinetic art, concrete art and (neo-)constructivism, Leblanc gained both national and international recognition. His work placed matter, light, rhythm and colour at the centre of the viewer’s experience, producing structural investigations imbued with a distinctly poetic sensibility.
I wish to thank Nele Luyts and Jan Stuyck from CKV, as well as the team behind the Walter & Nicole Leblanc Foundation—María Inés Rodriguez, Joris Dockx and Mirco Bimbi—and my fellow interns Alice Pieriboni and Alice Zitelli, for giving me this opportunity, welcoming me so warmly and teaching me the ways of archiving. It was a pleasure.
— Barbi García
