An archive, a body, an album, and a story is an exhibition resulting from a series of working sessions that took place within this artistic-research project’s first year, dedicated to the first thematic cluster “Personal Archives.” Our first working session as a group (Split, June 2023) was hosted by queerANarchive with the support of Prostor (CHC) and Dom mladih. Our last session (Exhibit Eschenbachgasse, Vienna, September – October 2023) was accompanied by a public program and concluded with an exhibition. In December 2024, on the occasion of the production of an accompanying publication, we re-staged the exhibition at Galerija Klub Kocka (Split).

Below you will find a comprehensive documentation of both iterations of the exhibitions, along with texts written by the year’s project participants.

Throughout September, a group of artists and researchers occupied the space of Exhibit Eschenbachgasse, every week in a slightly different configuration, in the context of Rafał Morusiewicz and Guilherme Maggessi’s project’s first year, dedicated to the thematic cluster “Personal Archives.” “An Archive, a Body, an Album, and a Story,” the title of this month-long encounter, pointed to the focus of each week: a Cruising Archive, a Fantasy Body, a Ghost Album, and a Glitch Story. Each week was informed by the participant’s respective practices and brought attention to a different set of topical issues, research strategies, and artistic practices through group readings, exercises, and discussions.

In order to facilitate a dialogue between the group working in the space, the public, and colleagues based in Vienna working with methods and topics close to our own, we convened public sessions every Wednesday, featuring contributions by members of our research group, sharing sessions by invited guests, as well as screenings and listening sessions of works that inform our project.

In the first week, we were joined by Ari Ban, who spoke about Gossip as a constitutive method of practicing archival research. The second week, titled “A Ghost Album” brought Vlad Beronja and Georgia Holz together. While Beronja discussed the work he developed throughout our sessions, Holz talked about her research into VBKÖ’s archive and how she has been dealing with the ghosts in the archive. The third and last week spured a lively discussion between Herbert Justnik, Mika Maruyama, Ivana Šerić, and Petar Vranjković.

By the end of the month, Exhibit Eschenbachgasse became an archive of its own, gleaning the remainders of these exchanges and encounters. We displayed this archive throughout the first week of October by shifting the space’s logic from a project/working space into an exhibition.

Below you will find the documentation of the exhibition and its single works together with texts by the respective authors.

In December 2024, on the occasion of the production of an accompanying publication, we re-staged the exhibition at Galerija Klub Kocka (Split). We partly re-assembled the group and brought the works, the actual works or their reproductions, back together into a different spatial disposition. This new setting was a backdrop to the launch of an accompanying publication, in which the themes and works developed throughout the project’s first year were developed.