The book “Reframing the Archive” emerges from a cycle of research seminars presented at the Portuguese Center of Photography (CPF), Portugal, between 2018 and 2019, attended by experts on photography, art history, philosophy and visual arts, including artists whose work explores the appropriation of archival images, approached as critical devices for rethinking historical narratives and the memory of past events.
The book brings together the contribution of guest speakers who participated in the events and whose contributions address the complexity of the archive and the potential interactions between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of its structure, between official and excluded documents, acknowledged histories and forgotten stories, thus opening up new possibilities not only of perceiving the gaps in historical narratives but also of reconfiguring the processes of individual and collective memory.
By contesting the principles of historicism and creating new aesthetic and conceptual articulations within photographic records, both scholars and artists defy previous structures of knowledge, providing new spaces of thinking and meaning.