Secret exhibition 2: THAT IS, IT IS REALLY NO TRUE CULTURE, BUT ONLY A WAY OF KNOWING ABOUT CULTURE

Philosophical reflections on the archive expose it as both a symptom of cultural processes and a site of their contestation—not a true culture in itself, but merely a means of knowing about culture. The encounter with the INDEX archive has sparked a rethinking of what archiving can be: not a passive repository, but an active, shifting terrain.

Rejecting traditional hierarchies and rigid taxonomies, letters, photographic negatives, recordings, post-it notes—once fractured remnants—are granted equal significance, dissolving archival gatekeeping in favor of a democratized materiality. This is not the result of an imposed system, but rather the organic form an archive takes when it is alive, when it reproduces conditions of access, engagement, and disruption.

To dismantle categorization is to resist the entrenched systems of preservation that have long privileged certain forms of knowledge over others. Rooted in philosophical critique, the research focused on how archives can be activated as spaces of reenactment and engagement.

Featuring glimpses into the physical archive (1990–1998), documentation material regarding the VHS collection, an AI-generated soundscape reflecting the digital archive’s loss in 2021, and police reports on the theft of INDEX backup hard disks a few months ago, the exhibition aimed to challenge the notion of archives as static vaults where objects “enter to die.”

Following the AI-generated voice and music, visitors found themselves in the storage hallway of INDEX, next to the kitchen, where they encountered a curated selection of readings. In the side exhibition room, within Call it Museum, original negatives, prints, remnants from INDEX’s past lives, accidental records of local and international histories, and critical interventions into the archive itself came together to create an unexpected unpacking of the archive and its evolving life.

Rather than a site of passive knowledge production, an archive can be a space of immediacy—of lived experience intersecting with radical potentiality. No longer a ghost haunting its contents, the archive can instead become an active agent that performs itself anew with each encounter, collapsing time, unsettling fixity, and making the present happen in the very moment it occurs.

Curated by Foteini Salvaridi.

This exhibition was presented at Index during CALL IT MUSEUM as part of a program of secret exhibitions. Some visitors found these exhibitions, located in a secret space created specially to define other exhibitional temporalities and ways to understand curatorial and institutional practice.