About the archive
About the archive / Credits
For more than four decades, the artistic production of Perejaume has been recorded in a physical archive. The digital platform, Arxiu Perejaume, is a project that began to gestate in 2016 out of the need to digitalise the content of the archive. Once this process had been initiated, the idea of transforming what until then had been a tool for private use, functional in nature, into an online platform for consultation, promotion and generation of knowledge began to take form.
The Arxiu Perejaume is a work in progress. It is envisaged the contents will be progressively updated in instalments. Once completed, it will be possible to consult 180 of the most significant works by Perejaume. Anybody interested in consulting a work outwith the selection will have to request it by email.
The archive is sui generis for a variety of reasons. Firstly, the descriptions of the works have been written by the artist himself. Secondly, faced with the difficulty of assigning one technique to certain works resistant to categorisation, given that Perejaume makes a very free use of different artistic languages, the usual system of classification, which assigns a category (painting, video or action) to each work, has been substituted for a system of labels that makes it possible to define the technique in an inclusive manner, that is to say accumulatively. In this way, a work like L’enclavament de Bellaterra (2007), that consists in the embedding of a 1,5 metre screw, inscribed with a poem, into the earth, can be defined simultaneously as sculpture, action, text and installation. This system facilitats, primarily, a less restrictive cataloguing of the work, that respects the hybrid nature of many of the objects and secondly, provides a more accurate sieve with which to trace the use of certain techniques across the work as a whole.
What makes it most particular is the application of this same system to the poetic and conceptual ambits. The labels of a conceptual order – that we have called knots- have not been designed as a strange ordering superstructure, far removed from the work, but rather a collection of ideas, motives and methods to which the works feed off, as if drawn to gravitational centres. To think about the work through these concepts is a logic that has been pursued in other occasions; in the catalogue of the exhibition Perejaume. Dibuixos i pintures (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Girona, 1997), Dis-exhibit (MACBA, 1999), Oleoducte (Sa Nostra, 1999), Retrotabula (ARTIUM, 2003), and Ai Perejaume, si veies la multitud d’obres que t’envolten, no en faries cap de nova! (La Pedrera, 2011).
From an archival perspective, this method endeavours also to index the poetic and conceptual aspects of the work. From the user’s point of view, it makes it possible, aside from the usual searches by title, year and technique, to browse beyond these parameters. To trace variations and actualisations of the same motif over the years, identifying the works which suppose a rupture, a link, or a new pathway and to discover recurrent ideas and motifs, establishing a dialogue, when necessary, between the plastic and the literary threads.
In short, this archive proposes to amplify the effect of the historical or genealogical narrative, by establishing connections, links and associations. Here it is not just about showing the information in way that graphically stratifies, ordering chronologically according to its origins, so much as enabling the establishment of new narratives and permitting new relational logics across the complete oeuvre.