IFP welcomes artist and researcher Yoeri Guépin who is doing a 6-month residency supported by the Mondriaan Fund.
His work has a strong emphasis on research and often involves historical trajectories of knowledge production such as archaeology, anthropology or the writing of history through objects. Through collecting and translating objects, artifacts and stories, their appropriation and re-contextualization, he aims at showing the governing structures of these systems, and how knowledge is represented through symbolic objects. He believes in the importance of artists working with cultural archives and the potential to activate objects in a way that politicize them linking them to present issues. Central to his practice is working with collecting and the anthropological/archaeological museum collection as site of knowledge production and it’s historical vernacular to colonialism. Reanimating the archive means for me engaging with, and rethinking of the ecology of artifacts, or the systems of relationships that have connections to and surrounds them in the past as well as in the present. Working without any fixed medium, most of his works finally materialize in a performative setting involving elements of film, text or objects sometimes activated at a specific site. During the 6-month residency period he will focus on the idea of the absence of archives and how collective memory can be re-constituted from traces, fragments and archival ghosts. What kind of mnemonic apparatus can activate and alter memory as a substitute for historical archival material in a system dominated by government censorship and state engineered amnesia? A part of his practice that he wants to explore further during the residency period, is working with fiction and speculation and the non human perspectives within historical and archival storytelling. In the coming months he will develop several voices (characters) that will be linked trough objects, documents and historical events that culminate into a performance and installation.
