Archiving the Other as Oneself: Sylvie Cotton

The idea of keeping a share of the world for oneself, the idea of drawing up an inventory of a fragment of the universe so as to appropriate it, is inherent in the act of collecting. One chooses to accumulate the signs of a reality that escapes us and which one wants to possess. It is through the accumulation of the same that one can account for variations inside a single corpus of objects. This is more often about objects than ideas. In fact, even if it remains theoretically possible to collect ideas, to compile them in some kind of an inventory or archive them, the collection refers mainly to a displaying of objects, the setting up of separate units that move within the same referent. The act of archiving follows that of collecting. In archiving one puts the collection in order. Here, it is less a question of the primary notion of the collection as a display than of maintaining objective elements of a bygone period in the present to ensure their conservation in the future. One is archiving without choosing; at least, the issue of choice that presides over the collector’s world is not central here. As for the inventory, it appears as the sum of the parts of a corpus. “To keep an inventory” allows one to know, to be aware of what is and what remains—to add up. Keeping an inventory also reveals what has disappeared.