Archive of intensities: between the virtual feminist museum and the rewriting of history

Abstract

Assessing the notion of “archive” in the realm of contemporary theory implies taking into account a tradition that stems from the philosophy of Michel Foucault in the late 1960s (especially in the Archeology of knowledge in 1969) and Jacques Derrida around his work Archie Fever of 1995, in addition to recent developments that try to unfold a more radical perspective. In this line is the art historian Griselda Pollock, who, like Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, challenges some of the most conventional assumptions of historiography and disarms the canons to look again at the fissures through which it filters into art History the art made by women. In recent works, Pollock follows the inspiration of the warburgian atlas to set up an archive of art made by women– a kind of virtual feminist museum– that relocates the works in a dialogue that forces us to rethink not only the disciplinary limitations, but a whole epistemological reconfiguration of art.