Giovanna Petrocchi

This work is a playful archive, where I act as a collector who borrows images from ancient times and contextualize them into imaginary landscapes and sci-fi scenarios. It is a personal journey between history of art, archaeology and the digital era, where the boundaries between the past and the future become undefined.

The motivation behind the series comes from my desire to ‘actively’ feel engaged when visiting an archive or a museum. In many museums collections, objects are static and inaccessible, literally and figuratively, confined in environments that make them somehow hostile to us. When looking at the artefacts behind a glass, the feeling is that they are imprisoned in the past. The transmission of art historical knowledge in traditional institutions is often entrusted to a rigid organization of objects and hermetic narratives. Because of that, the dissemination of artefacts’ data is for the most part instructional and academic and so the reception of antiques, from the viewers’ perspective, is limited to a contemplative action.

The project function as a personal research where I seek to explore alternative ways of accessing objects from the past, in the form of digitized or ‘modular’ artefacts, for instance. In this way, the relationship between the objects and myself become participative instead of static and the transmission of information more enjoyable. Moreover, in choosing to disseminate the artefacts in a digital or printed form, not only I subvert their original meaning, but I also liberate them and make accessible for everyone.

Inspired by the classification and arrangement of ancient art in traditional museums’ collections, I create my own catalogues of artefacts in a time that is in-between the present and the past, the historical and the fictional. By reconfiguring images from different sources, I populate these virtual pages with my own collection of surreal artefacts. The received view of ancient objects is deliberately distorted.

The work aims to question the very idea that culture can be contained by national boundaries and institutions, revealing instead an entity in constant flux, subject to transformative processes of migration and exchange. Some archival images are presented untouched, while others are dismembered or combined with new limbs or partners. Objects become unrecognisable and meanings fragment; presented as floating entities they belong to neither specific time or museum.

My source here is the digital collection of the Smithsonian Institution archives and the existing archival imagery function as a background where I add or remove elements from it. Sometimes I digitally erase all of the details so that I can insert new ones. The pre-existing images were glass negatives depicting historical findings, chronologically numbered from 1 to 5,075. My intervention aims to distort the original information by fabricating a new document in which real data of the artefacts are combined with new visual information.