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Objects of Migration, Photo-Objects of Art History: Encounters in an Archive
Costanza Caraffa, Almut Goldhahn, Massimo Ricciardo
Workshop with the cultural mediators of the AMIR project, 8 April 2022, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Photothek, Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai © Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, photographer: Bärbel Reinhard
Global migration, which is one of the most pressing matters facing our present-day world, is also a leitmotif in the work of artist Massimo Ricciardo. Since the year 2013, Ricciardo has collected objects in Sicily; objects that had accompanied refugees on their way across the Mediterranean Sea and were later thrown away or lost – and sometimes had to be handed over to the authorities when they arrived. These include articles that have an immediate connection to the journey such as water bottles, nautical charts, and life jackets, as well as completely personal articles including photographs, notebooks, and devotional souvenirs.
In the temporary installation Encounters, which was shown on several occasions in the rooms of the Photothek between 2017 and 2024, the artist had some of these objects enter into a dialogue with photo-objects and the archival structures of the Photothek. This confrontation gave rise to questions relating to burning issues of our time: Who do the objects belong to? Are they part of a cultural heritage? What are the adequate artistic, curatorial, and archival practices needed to do justice to this complex and sensitive material?
Until 2020, the curators and the artist guided visitors through the installation at the Palazzo Grifoni. From 2022 onwards, in collaboration with the Amir project (Accoglienza, musei, inclusione e relazione) in Florence, this role was assumed by cultural mediators with migratory backgrounds, thereby granting the objects of migration a distinct and powerful voice. The use of archives requires the responsible involvement of operators and users. Making an archive available for use generates co-responsibility. In Ricciardo’s installation, this becomes manifest in the gestures of all the participants, a choreography that partially recreates, in the setting of the Photothek, the caring gestures of archivists. Co-responsibility stems from collective acting in the archive.
The dialogues initiated around the installation in Florence subsequently informed a collective book project that brought together a multiplicity of perspectives. Published in 2023 under the title Encounters in an Archive: Objects of Migration / Photo-Objects of Art History (viaindustriae 2023, supported by the Ministero della Cultura), the volume served not only as the point of departure for a series of workshops, presentations, and round tables in Italy, Germany, and Belgium, in which the questions raised in the book were further elaborated, but also aims to stimulate further reflection on pressing issues of our time.
Almut Goldhahn und Massimo Ricciardo: Objects of Migration—Photo-Objects of Art History. Encounters in an Archive
In: Visual Anthropology, 34.4 (2021), pp. 339–367
read online
Massimo Ricciardo. Encounters in an Archive. Objects of Migration / Photo-Objects of Art History, edited by Costanza Caraffa and Almut Goldhahn, Foligno 2023
