Impulso historiográfico is a hybrid of artistic work and essay. I rewrite, in the form of a paraphrase, Hal Foster’s seminal article “An Archival Impulse,” published in 2004 in October, edited by Foster himself with Rosalind Krauss and Benjamin Buchloh, among others, and published by MIT Press.
In his article, Foster argues for the emergence of an archival art encompassing a range of artists whose production turns to historical information, much of it lost or displaced, to make it physically present. According to the author, these artists “not only draw on informal archives but produce them” and, in doing so, create worlds of their own.
In my view, this is where the difference between archivist artists and historian artists lies. Although they share many of the archivist artists’ strategies in the systematic organization of information, historian artists are less concerned with creating internal logics between data or inventing worlds based on symbolic arrangements of objects and texts. Their driving concern is the demand for a way of knowing the present through access to the past.
The Global South and the Historiographic Impulse
I believe there is a marked historiographic impulse in production from the Global South, where struggles to reclaim the right to memory are central. What is at stake here includes prohibitions silenced for decades in the dungeons of dictatorships, contested narratives, traumatic memories, and legacies of colonial brutality. My text follows exactly Foster’s structure, reproducing October’s graphic layout. I even preserve the positioning of the footnotes and images that appear in “An Archival Impulse.”
The reasoning unfolds in parallel, based on three artists, just as his did. In place of Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Sam Durant, I take the liberty of analyzing Bruno Moreschi, Bianca Turner, and Tiago Sant’ana. Hal Foster states that archival art was welcome in the context of the early 2000s because it was “a moment when, both artistically and politically, almost anything went and nothing stuck.”
