The ‘Matriarchive of the Mediterranean’: Myth, Migration, Matter and Matrix
Silvana Carotenuto, University of Naples “L’Orientale
My intervention brings attention onto a web-archive that I have created with a group of female scholars, devoted to the question of the archive, the arts and female creativity in the region of the Mediterranean. The group of researchers, that I led during some years of intense research, studied the question first philosophically, with a strong accent on Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, and The University without Conditions, where the philosopher proposes the construction of a new field of the Humanities with a return (which is always a transformation) to the logic of the ‘work’, urging for inventive interventions in the ‘practical’ outcome of teaching and research. That meant that, after the study of the general problematic of the archive, the group decided to create a real and proper ‘archive’, a ‘work’ which would be structured around the deconstructive areas proposed by Derrida for the creation of a new archive: the ‘constative’, the ‘performative’ and the ‘eventful’. This signified that the Matriarchive of the Mediterranean, or M.A.M, would archive existing works of emerging female artists producing art (different kinds of arts, as listed in the ’category’) in the area; it would use digital technology to turn the physical ‘place’ of the (patriarchal, canonical, and archeontic) archive into a performative space of hospitality-in-process; it finally would involve artists in the question of the event, allowing – against the horizon of expectations in terms of works to be saved, immobilized and ‘archived’– the opening of the archive to proposals, discussions, public events, the future-to-come of women’s creativity.
The site – which has been presented in various national and international venues – consists of four sections that refer to the question of ‘mythology’ (devoted to the so-called ‘Matriarchs’, in a trait of devotion for the artists who have left a legacy of ‘traces’ for the emerging productions of eventual ‘pupils’), the poetic of ‘migration’, the gendered interest in land-art and bio-art (the reference here goes to works related to the technical question of the ‘mother land’ and the ‘matrix’).
At the moment, M.A.M gives visibility to a limited series of art works; in the near future, it plans to turn into a native application, which will also enrich the site with different languages (for the time being, it uses Italian and English).
My intervention would greatly benefit from the chance of exploring what is already existent in the archive Mam at a conference that makes the ‘reformulation’, ‘novelty’ and ‘invention’ of new archives its the privileged topic of discussion.
http://www.matriarchiviomediterraneo.org/
Last updated: 30 January 2017
