ESP & EN (video and text bellow)
En 2018 comencé a crear un archivo de citas, sin saber por qué ni para qué lo hacía. Me movía, fundamentalmente, «emprender la lucha contra la dispersión» (Walter Benjamin, El libro de los Pasajes). En este archivo, que cuenta hasta el momento con citas de más de casi 60 libros, recopilé y sigo recopilando frases que tienen que ver con lugares. Los lugares y cómo nos relacionamos con ellos, pensamos en ellos o leemos sobre ellos ha sido una especie de obsesión que llevo arrastrando conscientemente desde hace casi una década. Eso explica el nombre de mi proyecto para la asignatura Atelier en el Monomaster de Estudios Literarios de la Universidad de Zúrich. El siguiente video y dossier, (ambos en inglés, el primero con fragmentos en español hacia el final) los presenté para esta materia en junio del 2023.
El trabajo consiste en analizar la naturaleza de este archivo haciendo uso de otros textos y otras citas. A su vez, consiste también en un ejercicio de activación de este archivo mediante la realización de un texto-collage con una selección de citas de la categoría «relación con los lugares». Las citas originales han sido mezcladas y adaptadas para crear un nuevo texto, el cual es leído en voz alta por distintas voces al final del video mientras por primera vez aparecen fotos de este archivo, en las que se ven sus trazos y marcas, su vida en el papel, mi mano y sus huellas.
Agradezco al profesor de este módulo, Johannes Binotto, por la inspiración que me dio durante sus clases, particularmente al mostrar su video Practices of Viewing IV: Screenshot, por su apoyo en cuanto presenté mi idea de proyecto y por su atento feedback que me permitirá seguir pensando y trabajando este proyecto y archivo inacabado.
También quiero agradecer a las personas que dieron sus voces a este texto-collage: Francisco Nel Aguirre, Paloma Ayala, Giselle Yuvone, Paula Sánchez Agudo, Alejandro Atrio, Santiago Gershánik, Elsa Cambra, Stefanía Larocca.
OBSESSIONS – Agustina Atrio
For my Atelier project, I decided to investigate an archive that I have been nurturing for the last four years. This archive gathers quotes that I have been collecting from different books, at the moment almost 60 books, from different genres, periods, authors’ origins and languages (although the vast majority of these books have been read in Spanish), which are all related to places. Places and how we relate to them, think about them or read about them has been a kind of obsession that I have been consciously carrying around for almost a decade. That explains the name of my project.
I have asked myself many times: what is this archive and what could I do with it? This research for Atelier is a way of trying to answer both questions. I would like to argue that in order to attempt an answer by analyzing this archive made of quotes from books, I will do so using other quotes and other books.
For a project about a text – the archive – made or created by myself, I decided to create all the visual and sound materials of the video essay. The video is divided into five parts: the first with the title «Obsessions», a part called «To collect», another one «To classify», a fourth one «To make a collage», and the last one «A collage of texts and voices».
In the first part of the video I present my archive and it relation with the title of this project.
In the chapter «To Collect» I have quoted Walter Benjamin’s phrases about collectors and collections from his book The Arcades Project. As Anna Maria Guasch explains in her text Arte y Archivo 1920-2010. Genealogías, Tipologías y Discontinuidades, Walter Benjamin makes his unfinished work about the arcades through quotations and fragments that he unites with the technique of assembling material (22). By storing this material, Benjamin replaces the discursive text with an accumulation of different quotations, in an open and flexible project whose focus is Paris in XIX. This chapter of his book speaks in fact of Benjamin himself. He too is a collector, a collector of quotations, like me.
As we listened to in the video essay, collecting is a way of remembering and of fighting against dispersion (Benjamin 211). But to fight against dispersion, it is necessary to reach a certain order, so that the archive does not reproduce the primitive disorder. This is when classification comes into the scene. In Benjamin’s words: “It must be kept in mind that, for the collector, the world is present, and indeed ordered, in each of his objects. Ordered, however, according to a surprising and, for the profane understanding, incomprehensible connection”(207).
Classification is not something fixed, lasting or comprehensible to all. The same sense is made by the quotation from Georges Perec’s book Pensar/Clasificar in this chapter: classification does not last. This is something I wanted to reflect in the last part of my video essay by showing photos of my archive as the voices read the text-collage. These photos show different attempts over time to classify the archive, all superseded by a later new category: underlining with pen, marker colors overlapping across different classifications, signs marking important parts and then forgetting what they want to mark, a numbering system to order the sheets during this work, post its to divide by subject… These marks are also part of the archive and make it a lived and worked object.
On the other hand, in categorizing the quotes I found that many themes and ideas are repeated. This speaks of my own obsessions because the hand that selects some and discards others is mine. Someone else’s file, even on the same subject and taking the same books, would surely be different. But it is my hand that, following its own obsessions, puts in dialogue sentences from different characters and narrators who, nevertheless, speak of the same thing, either coinciding or opposing ideas on the same subject.
For this research, I have created different categories to classify the themes of the quotations, and, from all of them, I have chosen to work only with the category «places/relations with places». However, I would like to point out that the selected category is only a part of this file. There are several categories that also indicate the evolution of my interests: from the city and the urban, to nature, rivers, and forests. These categories represent my readings and with them, as Perec says about the objects on his work table, «a certain history of my preferences» (29)[1].
During the Atelier classes I came back in contact with the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. This book allowed me to understand the nature of my collection of quotes. I extract from books the quotes that, for some reason, touch me in relation to my interest in places. These extracted quotes become isolated islands of text, but these islands also form an archipelago, a group or collection of islands. In Invisible Cities, Marco Polo travels from city to city. In the book, the cities are an archipelago in which the sea is not described. What lies between these cities we do not get to know as readers. Marco Polo says to the Great Khan in the chapter “Continued Cities 4”: “You reproach me because each of my stories takes you right into the heart of a city without telling you of the space that stretches between one city and the other, whether it is covered by seas, or fields of rye, larch forests, swamps”(107). My quotation extraction works the same way: we are only able to read and connect fragments; what is not taken from the original text, what is not collected, we do not know.
Continuing with this chapter, Marco Polo tells a story about his encounter with a goatherd. The man, unlike Polo, only distinguishes the pastures surrounding the cities, cities that, for him, separate one pasture from another. What we choose to see is a matter of a different way of looking. In the landscape, or in the text, we find everything, and then we extract.
While thinking about this, I remembered two images made by Guy Debord: Guide Psychogéographique de Paris and The Naked City (both from 1957). About the first one, Francesco Carreri explains in his book Walkscapes that we see a broken Paris with lost pieces. The unity it’s lost and we only see fragments in an empty space (85). In the second one he refers to neighborhoods that are drifting continents in a liquid space.
The fragments of the city are islands; the arrows are different ways of relating and connecting them. What I intend here is to try to find the relationships between these isolated fragments. I used these images, like Toon Jonsen’s “It’s Not About the Destination but About the Journey to It” (2020), in the «To make a collage» chapter of my video. Many of the phrases in the various books speak to the same theme. Through classification I was able to see more clearly the links between them, the arrows. What was an archipelago is assembled to form a new creation, a new text, made of fragments («The places have mingled», Calvino 108). However, in the chapter «A collage made of text and voices» I still wanted to maintain the fragmentation through the different voices. Each voice reads one or several sentences that belong to a different book. The sets of voices in turn form separated texts, which can be distinguished according to whether they are male or female voices. The voices are together but at the same time identifiable; they do not lose their individuality. Like a paper collage, we can identify the different parts.
Invisible Cities is Marco Polo’s oral account of his travels to the Great Khan. In relation to this orality that the book wants to represent, I also wanted the text-collage to be presented orally. For this I asked different Spanish mother tongue speakers, with different accents and living in three different countries, to read the sentences. At the same time, I wanted these people to have a close connection with me, to be family or friends in order to maintain the affective bond I have with my archive. While I was very happy with the result, it was not always equally easy to receive the recordings as not all participants have the same experience reading aloud. In some cases I had to ask them to repeat the recordings because they were read with a strange and unnatural intonation or had disruptive background sounds.
With this text-collage I present one reading of my archive of quotations, but it is only one of many possible ones. As Anna Maria Guasch explains in another essay called “Los Lugares de la Memoria. El Arte de Archivar y de Recordar” the narrative that can result from an archive is neither linear nor irreversible, but open, interchangeable and endless (158). This is so because the components of the archive are open to be recombined into new forms, narratives, and meanings.
As for the process of making the video essay, I decided to use part of the presentation I made during the Atelier classes. The power point slides were used to present the title and the relationship between the title and the object of analysis. During this first minute, a picture of my archive is presented, and this is going to be the only picture of it until the end, when we see different slides while the voices read.
I decided to show the process of making this video essay; the script notes I took to organize the different parts, my handwriting, and my hands, as a way to reflect my subjectivity behind the whole project.
I also decided to read Benjamin’s and Perec’s quotes when their books are open.
The video from my photo printer wants to show the working process I would go through to make the collage: putting the quotes together, trying different combinations, choosing the right text, splitting it again to send it to the different readers, assembling the voices, creating the collage of texts and voices. Making all the video and sound material was a long job of thinking, testing and assembling. Now that I think about it, it was also like making a collage.
The sound that appears at the end, before and after the voices read, is a piece I made by putting together recordings of sounds made with paper, along with a clicking of the tongue that I produced when I made a mistake and which I decided to keep in the piece.
In deciding to make each element that appears in the video, the task was not easy. Many things took a lot of time and planning, while others were so difficult that I am still not happy with the result. Regarding the latter, I am referring for example to the technical issue of putting the subtitles in English. Finding the right time for the viewer to be able to read and at the same time for the subtitles to accompany what is being said is something that did not work well for me and could be improved with more technical skill, time and patience.
In any case, I am happy with the result. I think I have at least answered the question of what this file is, both for this work and for myself. Regarding the second question (what can I do with this file) I have explored much of what I presented in the Atelier class. I have created a narrative around it, I have created collage texts from the quotes and finally, I have done a collective read aloud of part of it. My archive is no longer an inexplicable thing lying on my desk.
[1] Translation is mine. Original: “una cierta historia de mis gustos”.
Works cited
Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, United States of America, Harvard University Press, 1999.
Calvino, Ítalo, Invisible Cities, A Harvest Book.
Carreri, Franceso, Walkscapes. El andar como práctica estética, Spain, Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2017.
Guasch, Anna Maria, Arte y Archivo 1920-2010. Genealogías, Tipologías y Discontinuidades, Madrid, Akal/Arte Contemporáneo, 2011.
Guasch, Anna Maria, “Los Lugares de la Memoria. El Arte de Archivar y de Recordar”, Materia. Revista del Departamento de Historia del Arte. Universidad de Barcelona, vol. 5, pp. 157-183, 2005.
Perec, Georges, Pensar/Clasificar, Spain, Gedisa Editorial, 2017.
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