what is an archive?

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Archive Box 110/989 (more details via the link below) was discovered by PJLeese in the summer of 2022. The Box was, apparently, abandoned in a garbage disposal area outside an apartment block in the southern Polish city of Kraków. More specifically on the 1960s housing estate, Osiedle Tysiąclecia (Millennium Estate) in the north of the city, where PJLeese lived through the 1990s and 2000s. Made by an artist or artists unknown, the box contents appears to register social, aesthetic and imaginative transitions towards the 1990s ‘post-communist’ era. Through a variety of collage techniques, juxtapositions of text and image, and creative writing as well as digital manipulation and analogue cut-ups a past moment is imagined. A close inspection of the Box calls into question the nature of our knowledge about the past.

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PJLeese was of course fascinated and delighted by the discovery of the box. Inspired by this find, the artist and writer is currently engaged in a research project on ‘post-conflict’ moments in the twentieth century. The material presented here will eventually be incorporated into a published project summed up in the question ‘what is an archive?’

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Click below to see images and documents connected to Archive Box 110/989:

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