Discover the Artexte's collection here and on our Instagram from another perspective
Throughout 2021, Artexte will unveil a series of unboxing videos featuring members of our team, guest artists, curators, researchers. The Artexte Unboxings series will feature each invitee as they search through our shelves and choose a box, a file, a publication, or another item from our collection to unpack and reveal on video. The collection, which has been deprived of public interaction for almost a year, has asked to be activated!
Each member of our community has a unique relationship with our collection. This physical experience of searching through records, investigating a subject, a question, or person of interest, is unique to each researcher. The pandemic has —in addition to limiting our proximity to other people— reduced our access to print materials and has made searching within physical collections more complicated, restricted. Researcher treasure troves have also moved entirely to a virtual format, and by extension, the embodied experience of research is slowly being forgotten.
The spark of this idea came from a conversation I had with Dr. Johanne Sloan in late August. We talked about materiality, a subject she was immersed in for a class she was preparing — online, immaterially. We reflected on the haptic limitations caused by the public health circumstances and the constraints on how we navigate the world outside our homes, without our hands. This sensory deprivation, our longing for browsing through books and folders, can perhaps be mildly appeased by witnessing the manipulation of these objects. How could this be applied at Artexte? The Unboxings were born.
Artexte’s unboxing videos will reclaim the online phenomenon heavily associated with pure consumerism and bring it to the world of archival research, all while keeping the bonus extra-sensory effects afforded by A.S.M.R. (autonomous sensory meridian response). Discover our guests’ research interests and their unique ways of embodying the research process. And mostly, enjoy the sometimes-awkward nature of forced performance. And the limited range of our editing skills.
— Mojeanne Behzadi
To read and watch now on articles, the blog of Artexte:
La Bibliothèque Fantastique of Antoine Lefebvre, by Anabelle Chassé — Gallery and Communcations Assistant at Artexte
A Chance Unboxing, by Mojeanne Behzadi — Research and Exhibitions Coordinator at Artexte
381 — HONGRIE — ARTPOOL — (Budapest), by Jessica Hébert — Librarian at Artexte