Survival: “Phenomena are often repeated in eras very distant
from each other with astonishing similarity, at least in the deeper
sense, even if the costumes have changed.”
Burckhardt, Considérations sur l’histoire universelle, p.61
XX Fantastic
Survival
Exploring the Matricules archive is a bit like listening in on
a conversation, or looking in through a keyhole. Looking back at the
first Femmes br@nchées (Wired Women) salons,
most of which were filmed and archived, a whole different world shows
its face. These women were just discovering the technological tools and
interfaces that are in common usage today: CD-ROMs, communications and
networking sites like Facebook , or the more
recent appearance of the Ile Sans Fil , a
not-for-profit organization whose mission is to offer free internet
access to the entire Montreal population. Innovation in technology is
always surprising. Through the eyes of these women, I discover – as
if for the first time – tools that are very familiar to me today, as
though the surprise effect lives on even though the subject matter is
no longer new. Looking at archived documents therefore becomes a
process of re-discovery. When you page through the archives
of a specific time, you get an idea of the atmosphere of that
particular period, that year, that evening. And looking at
the documents all together, you also notice how certain behaviours have
been lost, become obsolete, and how certain rituals remain current and
are repeated, only with different faces. In this way,
archives can evoke the fantastic, even the ghostly. Archives are the
things that survive, the vestiges that are waiting for their chance to
come back to life.