archive comprising print media, video and audio material
[presented at: I Will Not Throw Rocks, Formcontent, London, 2007]

For the London Section of the archive, Francesco Pedraglio, one of the curators of the space where it was shown, was invited to devise and implement a system of organisation for the archive.
Francesco worked to implement his system directly in the exhibition space, thus causing the archive to be in continuous change during the time it was open to the public.

Francesco’s system was based in a classification system devised by the philosopher Francis Bacon for scientific inquiry. The documents of the archive were thus organised into Pars Construens and Pars Destruens of destruction; this is, the constructive and the destructive elements of destruction.
In his opinion, and in his own words, "the extreme consequence is that the idea of destruction and its strength of subverting given systems (...) is subjectively reorganised into an even more general methodology in such a way that it looses its peculiarity in favour of generic archival concepts. At the same time this very methodology connects the archive to occult trends of hermeticism and alchemy (as were Bacon’s theories), opening up again the power of destruction, but from a very different point of view."

 

diagram and text: Francesco Pedraglio