Holds all the categories.
The ICI is anchored by the belief that building worlds is a creative act. We understand art as a uniquely open field of possibilities inside society where it acts as a reflection of complex and sometimes hidden relationships, as a catalyst for imaginative speculation and … Continue readingAbout the ICI
Welcome to the ICI laboratory – an online enactment of our work at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry. We have created this arena for the play of random ideas that set into motion a string of associations whose sometimes-unfathomable connections can needle you, taunt … Continue readingAN INTRODUCTION
We are the Associates of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry.
The well-worn but faithful drawers of the ICI’s Ephemera Kabinett. We call the material contained in these drawers ephemera because by they time it comes to us its initial purpose has expired; someone has decided to discard the object (or if we’re lucky, has decided … Continue readingICI Ephemera Kabinett
These pages, that represent the 385 images from W. G. Sebald’s four published prose fictions, jump-started our 5-year long study of the late author’s work. By attempting to bring the pictures back to their pre-publication state where they existed only as parts of Sebald’s Bildmaterial, … Continue readingSebald’s photo archive
Cabinet is a wonderful publication that often acts as our (unauthorized) mascot. We wish we had the money and time to do what they do but we’re glad there is someone else out there who cares about and plays with The Archive in ways that … Continue readingCabinet
What happens when we apply western constructs to non-western archives?When the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún set out to record the world of the Aztecs in 1540, he complained about “hidden meanings that are unrecognizable.” In Book X of his 12 volume Florentine Codex, written in native Nahua with sections translated to Spanish, he … Continue readingFlorentine Codex … Continue readingFlorentine Codex
André Malraux is perhaps best known for his idea of the “Museum Without Walls”, a museum in the mind, comprising the art of past centuries and civilizations. Malraux visualized art without the traditional confines (and constructs) of the museum grouping, i.e., by country and periodization. … Continue readingMuseum Without Walls
The telegraph room at the Mundaneum circa 1930, Paul Otlet’s ambitious project to create a master bibliography of all the world’s published knowledge. His interest in collecting magazines, journals, photographs, posters and all kinds of ephemera and not just books mimics our own activities at … Continue readingMundaneum
Sebald, Dean and Warburg explore the power of the Archive.The Archive figured prominently in the ICI’s third title, Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald. In her essay that considered the work of Tacita Dean and Joseph Beuys through the prose fictions of W. G. Sebald, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes compares Dean’s Floh (2001) … Continue readingMnemosyne Atlas … Continue readingMnemosyne Atlas