Flanders Art Archives Centre
Care of Art Archives
The Flanders Art Archives Centre is committed to looking after the art archives in Flanders. Subject to remuneration by the Flemish Government, the Centre will start in January 2019. While visual art archives and legacies form an integral part of our cultural heritage, they are often spread across various locations and only partially accessible, if at all. This is one of the reasons why it is necessary to pay extra attention to the preservation, management and organisation of visual art archives and legacies. In order to serve this particular field well, the Flanders Art Archives Centre wants to use a distributed model, where preservation, care, giving meaning and broad access are largely decentralised.
As a hub, the Flanders Art Archives Centre will provide various specific services to creators and administrators of archives. The Centre focuses on archive creators from the broad field of contemporary visual art: artists, artists’ collectives, galleries, art halls, curators, collectors, art critics, art organisations, etc. Moreover, the Centre maps archive potential and expertise, and deploys its own expertise and actions for visual art archives in Flanders. The Centre aims to raise awareness within the field of art archives and legacies and galvanise it into action by stimulating research, contextualization and the social activation of art archives. The Centre will itself take a number of initiatives to this end, in parallel with its operation through the networks to which it belongs. The Flanders Art Archives Centre also follows developments in the international field and sets out its own best practices internationally.
In preparation for the Centre, a valuation framework and methodology for art archives will be worked out in 2018 and we will start drawing up a field map. The I.C.C. archives and the legacy of Hugo Roelandt, among others, are used as case studies to describe a number of visual art archives and to make them accessible to the public. In collaboration with Archiefbank Vlaanderen and PACKED, a study day on the care of art archives will be held on 18 June 2018. At the beginning of 2017, M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp launched the idea of a Flanders Art Archives Centre.
In his policy document on culture at the start of his term of office, Minister Sven Gatz outlined this additional role of knowledge hub for art archives under the umbrella of the M HKA.
For a decade now, there has been an archive-driven collection vision in the M HKA and a start has been made on archiving the Panamarenko archives, for example. In addition, in 2011, digitisation was put forward as a catalyst for this archival work, with ensembles.org as a platform. Since then, the M HKA has, year after year, been taking steps to develop thorough professional archiving.
M HKA has asked two of the textbook institutions in the field of art heritage to sponsor the Centre’s initiative: the Centre for Flemish Architectural Archives and the Letterenhuis. Together with them, the M HKA has written a white paper, which was subsequently tested against a broader range of players in the visual arts. After an archival infrastructure and depot were put in place in the summer of 2017, a policy plan was submitted at the end of that year in accordance with the new Heritage Decree (service role). Thanks to this, field support can be put in place from 2019 onwards. In short, given the pressing need for an integrated field, for more networking, for archival potential and capacity that is made accessible, valorised and activated, for supporting expertise in Flanders and for frameworks outside Flanders, a Flanders Art Archives Centre is being established within the M HKA today.
More info? Contact Evi Bert: evi.bert@muhka.be or Jan Stuyck: jan.stuyck@muhka.be
