Archiwum fotografii - maszyna pamięci i śmierci
The Photography Archive – A Machine of Memory and Death

Summary/Abstract: The paradox of Tadeusz Kantor’s message in The Milano Lessons – “remember everything/ and forget everything…” – serves the author as a point of departure in situating the concept of the archive at the crossroads of phenomenological ideas and the concept of the trace. The unpacking of how to understand the notion of the archive (stressing the contradictions Kantor adored) allows Fazan to  dramatize its function as a reservoir of the past and an empty place. The article reconstructs the process of creating the Living Archive within the Cricoteka, something Kantor saw as both a concrete place and a space for ideas. The material analyzed from the archives were the photography collections from the beginning and end of the Theater of Death. The article interprets a series of pictures of the mythologized work The Dead Class, which exists in a network of scattered photographic representations, making the “powerful” depiction dissolve and perish, and the photographs documenting Today Is My Birthday, which to some degree never existed in its final form, but survives in visual materials as an intact and complete work of art.

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