Parte I - "Their Things Spoken"

“An Atlas of everyday lif.e."

“By the 1960s at the latest, interest was beginning to focus on the aura of used objects. Legitimized by Duchamp´s radical declaration that industrial objects were worthy of art status, the suceeding generations of artists incorporated all areas of everyday life into their artistic methods.

Today, the diminishing aura of the work of art has been accompanied by a rise in that of the utility object when used as artmaking material, since such objects refer to production conditions in consumerist mass culture yet function still as fragments of an individual biography or collective context life. Many contemporary approaches suggest that the current interest in memory techniques and their cultural effects is leaving its mark on art, too. Thus, artists ´adoption of archival structures articulates a growing awareness of the expressive power of marginal biographies that, normally submerged in the daily flood of spectacular events, seldom play a role within the “major narrative” of historical facts. Private experience and the accounts of anonymous individuals can be used to strategically undermine the monolithic consensus that dominates the official “storyline” of world history. Memory is always selective, guided by political motives, striving to meet the official version of events. Especially, the media and the public consciousness function according to the principle of forgetting and holding back information. Their Things Spoken by Agnes Hegedüs refers to the gulf between the conservation and valuation of officially recognized cultural representations and the information content of beares of personal significance originating in apparently unimportant, unknown biographies. The artist distributed among visitors to the ZKM a leaflet asking, “Why not put your favorite object in a museum?”. This question stimulated the museum visitors to reflect upon rituals of appreciating and keeping, and to relate the museum exhibits to the relics to which they attribute private significance." (continua)

in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel; The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003.