If one had to choose a concept around which Mabe Bethônico’s work may be articulated, the first option to come to mind would probably be “museum,” a notion present in almost of all her works, from Módulo itinerante do Museu do Sabão [Soap Museum itinerant module] (2003) through to her Museu dos Assuntos Públicos [Museum of Public Concerns] (2013). The virtual platform that groups information concerning a selection from her oeuvre is named museumuseu. However, her highlighting of ‘museum’ as institution by constantly using the word or signifier “museum” perhaps conceals the real force driving Mabe Bethônico’s work: her interest in archives. Let us recall that in the early 2000s, Hal Foster was already talking about an “archiving impulse” as a characteristic trend of the new century’s art. In an attempt to define new ways of action for contemporary artists, after the artist-ethnographer, the U.S. critic’s An Archival Impulse (2003) featured an archivist-artist confronting the collapse of the apparent totalities that structured the symbolic order of modernity, and trying to construct new forms of meaningful relationships by appropriating elements from the past. This trend is consciously proposed in Bethônico’s artistic practice. Throughout her work, there is a constant effort to build meaningful relationships by accumulating fragments. It is from this archival operation that she turns to the art’s institutions and diverts institutional discourse beyond its habitual framework to originate counter-narratives and create new meanings for places of memory.*
Let us examine how this progressively developed throughout her work. In 1996, the artist invented a character she called O Colecionador [The Collector] by collecting particularly newspaper clippings and organizing them into four categories: “Destruction,” “Corrosion,” “Construction,” and “Flowers.” These categories may seem random, but a meticulous classification system was derived from them. From the outset, therefore, Mabe Bethônico has been interested in these two typical operations of the archivist, accumulation and classification, applying them first to texts and images, next to the field of objects. With her Módulo itinerante do Museu do Sabão** she created a fictional museum that is actually contained entirely in one archive. The categories that structure this archive lend their name to typical sections of a museum: “new acquisitions,” “permanent collec- If one had to choose a concept around which Mabe Bethônico’s work may be articulated, the first option to come to mind would probably be “museum,” a notion present in almost of all her works, from Módulo itinerante do Museu do Sabão [Soap Museum itinerant module] (2003) through to her Museu dos Assuntos Públicos [Museum of Public Concerns] (2013). The virtual platform that groups information concerning a selection from her oeuvre is named museumuseu. However, her highlighting of ‘museum’ as institution by constantly using the word or signifier “museum” perhaps conceals the real force driving Mabe Bethônico’s work: her interest in archives. Let us recall that in the early 2000s, Hal Foster was already talking about an “archiving impulse” as a characteristic trend of the new century’s art. In an attempt to define new ways of action for contemporary artists, after the artist-ethnographer, the U.S. critic’s An Archival Impulse (2003) featured an archivist-artist confronting the collapse of the apparent totalities that structured the symbolic order of modernity, and trying to construct new forms of meaningful relationships by appropriating elements from the past. This trend is consciously proposed in Bethônico’s artistic practice. Throughout her work, there is a constant effort to build meaningful relationships by accumulating fragments. It is from this archival operation that she turns to the art’s institutions and diverts institutional discourse beyond its habitual framework to originate counter-narratives and create new meanings for places of memory. Let us examine how this progressively developed throughout her work. In 1996, the artist invented a character she called O Colecionador [The Collector] by collecting particularly newspaper clippings and organizing them into four categories: “Destruction,” “Corrosion,” “Construction,” and “Flowers.” These categories may seem random, but a meticulous classification system was derived from them. From the outset, therefore, Mabe Bethônico has been interested in these two typical operations of the archivist, accumulation and classification, applying them first to texts and images, next to the field of objects. With her Módulo itinerante do Museu do Sabão** she created a fictional museum that is actually contained entirely in one archive. The categories that structure this archive lend their name to typical sections of a museum: “new acquisitions,” “permanent collection,” “temporary exhibitions.” But if art museums may be correctly regarded as archives of art, they have their particularity too: unlike other types of archives, art museums must ceaselessly propose their updating—which is done through their own practice: the exhibition. At first sight, Bethônico’s works seem to be addressing the archival function of museums rather than their exhibiting aspect.
When invited to participate in the 2006 Bienal de São Paulo, Bethônico’s idea was to show precisely the institution’s own archives. But her aim was not just to exhibit content extracted from the archives, remove the mnemonic function from the objects, and aestheticize them. On the contrary, exhibiting classificatory documents was a question of problematizing the archives and practices through which the institutions select their objects and build their memory. Above all, it was a question of publicly disclosing records that had previously been known only to members of the Foundation and a restricted group of scholars. A cross-section plan of the building showed visitors the impressive scale of the Wanda Svevo Archive that occupies a substantial portion of the Bienal building. Bethônico designed an advertising campaign that finally asked visitors to discover these archives on their own account. Far from a mere specific intervention, the operation had major impact, made the institution more aware of its internal deficiencies, and energized refurbishing work to ensure adequate infrastructure for documents and visitors. Particularly important was the work of collecting questions that members of the public phoned in for archive staff and other questions from visitors at the Bienal exhibition. This process was extended to the following Bienal de São Paulo in 2008, when curators Ivo Mesquita and Ana Paula Cohen proposed a discussion about the institution itself. Bethônico intervened once again to challenge the Foundation’s relations with Ibirapuera Park’s surroundings. In addition to reusing documents from the Wanda Svevo Archive, Bethônico sought to end the Bienal’s isolation by engaging staff at other institutions located in the park.
Thus, we see that procedures that were once instruments of confrontation— in institutional critique art of the 1970s and 1980s—seemingly became primarily instruments of knowledge that may help remodel the institutions. We also found this aspect in other works by Bethônico, such as Telling Histories (2003), in which piecing together different narratives about the past and the present of an art institution—Kunstverein München— initially involved organizing its archives, with Bethônico in charge of building collections, creating a database, and arranging interfaces through which queries or searches could access data. Something different was proposed in the work Bethônico made between the above-mentioned two São Paulo biennials Caracteres Geológicos Peculiares [Distinctive geological characters] was presented in Medellín in 2007. In the Museo de Antioquia’s library, Bethônico showed visitors elements that usually remain unseen but are essential for the functioning of any institution that requires conservation. Boxes, cans, signage labels, and other packaging materials found in the deposits of the Colombia National University’s Tulio Ospina Mineralogy Museum were displayed. This movement to bring to light fundamental devices that normally remain out of public perception—and which we also find in Área restrita [Restricted Area] (2009), in situ work done for the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo—gives us a great clue to understand Mabe Bethônico’s work. For if, when she proposes to make museums, the artist seems to actually do archives—or, if she seems to call a museum what is, in fact, an archive—this is not without reason. When we think of art museums, exhibition is the first thing that comes to mind. Only rarely do we think of the archival function of this institution. When making archives and calling them museums, Bethônico points out the point of contact between these two functions. If on the one hand, the artist approaches precisely the less visible facet of the museum institutions, at the same time, it causes the archive to leave its habitual invisibility. Thus, the archive must invade the exhibition space, causing elements from the past to overspill into the present. This to-andfro movement between the archive and the museum results in an effort to make public and current the work, usually undertaken by specialists, of building a social memory that remains inaccessible to the eyes of most viewers. However, an anodyne character such as the collector’s shows that the gathering of vestiges of the past can be a commonplace, daily activity for all. What is more, institutions might fail to carry out this task, thus evoking the need for an expanded field of memory building.
While exploring the archives of the International Labor Organization, Bethônico observed that the institution’s had no photographs of mining work in Brazil— despite its being one of the country’s main economic activities past and present. She then initiated her Invisibilidade mineral [Mineral invisibility] project, which initially consisted of producing mining photographs to be donated to the ILO’s archives, thus intervening directly in the archives of an important international institution that had no connection with the art world. A new project emerged in the course of her work. While visiting the Ministry of Labor offices, Bethônico discovered ephemeral photographic archives that had never been published. The team in charge of monitoring work conditions gathered thousands of pictures taken in mines. These images evinced a very specific gaze, quite different from the artist’s. They had been temporarily saved on hard disks in the inspection service’s computers to illustrate reports on workplace conditions, but were not subsequently conserved by the institution. So, Bethônico began creating archives to preserve this material and eventually started a new museum in dialogue with other collections and studies built up over years of studying the mining industry. This museum was named Museu dos Assuntos Públicos [Museum of Public Concerns]. As the name suggests, Bethônico’s interest was not related to any aesthetic criteria, as if an artistic talent had been discovered hidden in a bureaucratic department; nor was it limited to repetitive reports of precarious working conditions in mines. Her intention was a broader matter of interrogating the very notion of “publicsphere.” Mining is the region’s main economic activity and it directly affects the everyday lives of local inhabitants. How could so little be known about their working conditions? How come documents produced for this activity are not publicized? Or not even preserved in many cases?
From this museum-archive juncture, between the need to conserve and the need to exhibit, a different meaning of public eventually emerges. The public should obviously be primarily opposed to the widespread privatization prompted by neoliberalism over the last few decades. However, this should not mean taking an overly simple and habitual attitude in favor of the State. The notion of ‘public’ that emerges from this project could hardly be taken for the Statesphere. After all, the photographs were taken by Ministry of Labor inspectors who are part of the State: nevertheless, they were not yet public. The notion of ‘public’ referred to here opposes neoliberal privatization but also reaches beyond the State. Both these spheres are perceived as opaque. The concept of ‘public’ that this museum enacts therefore strives to incorporate everything that remains as part of everyday life despite being rejected by economic and state powers.
Starting from the original Greek arkhè, Derrida’s elebrated Mal d’Archive (1995) traces the term’s nomological and topological implications. Archives were kept by the highest magistrates or archons, and reflected their power by being located in their homes (‘domiciliation’). Works produced by artists such as Bethônico seem to disrupt the foundational characteristics of archives by supplanting the archons’ institutional functions and taking over as new guardians of documents kept under their own new institutional arrangements. By doing so, the artist may be pointing toward a communalization of archives and a broader socialization of the role of preserving and exhibiting vestiges of the past. This gesture has a profoundly political aspect. If contemporary society may be characterized as a “society of the spectacle”—to use the formula coined by Guy Debord, himself a filmmaker of the archive—this reflects the growing gap between lived experience and the sphere of representation. In this context, pointing to ways and means of re-presenting and resignifying the past may be seen as an anti-spectacle gesture par excellence and an attempt to reconcile experience with representation in a confrontational disruption of contemporary society’s alienating rationale.
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*This is a revised and enlarged version of a lecture given at Georges Pompidou Center in Paris on June 4, 2016, as part of the Museum On/ Off exhibition.
**This work is not featured in this book but may be found on the artist’s website at https://www.ufmg.br/museumuseu/museudosabao/ —Ed.
