Memories in redaction: art and technology in the reinterpretation of the past

Abstract

How has art revisited “official” historical pasts and their institutional collections? Starting from this question, we propose an analysis of how contemporary artists have critically engaged with historiography and its colonial archives. The research, resulting from a collaboration between two researcher-curator-artists, brings together a selection of international and national cases—including our own practices in the field—with the aim of investigating how art has articulated concerns with memory, museological practices, and new technologies. We examine works involving critical exhibition strategies and the use of archival images, as well as contemporary technical procedures, such as the manipulation of high-resolution digital documents. The text highlights how these tools enable greater access to collections and expand the field of artistic action, particularly for historically marginalized subjects. Alongside the artists themselves, public and private institutions—especially museums—are mentioned, as they are implicated in this process in different ways: sometimes as reifiers of colonial dynamics, sometimes as agents interested in rewriting and reworking their own collections and archives. The discussion explores the importance of museological practices such as exhibition, inventory, cataloging, digitization, and the challenges associated with their uses in the current context, where both social demands and new technologies have become unavoidable.