In her article, Agnieszka Karpowicz analyses the archival recordings of Miron Białoszewski found in the Józef Czechowicz Literary Museum in Lublin and stored in the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw. She pays particular attention to the non-verbal sound layer of the recordings. She is mainly interested in various background noises and other impurities on the cassette tapes, i.e., sounds which usually disappear or are minimized when recordings are digitized and processed before they are make available to the audience. The analysis is the starting point of reflections on the authenticity and originality of archival phonographic materials in the context of the relationship of the recording to time and place: the event, the recording of it, the storing of tapes. Karpowicz’s considerations take into account the chronotopicity of the digitized versions made available to the public by museums. The noise that can be heard on the recordings is related to technical issues (the quality of the recording, the features of the magnetic tape, and others); this, in turn, is related to the idea of temporality: tape recording is perceived as time recording chronography), which allows Karpowicz to place it in the context of recording as a feature of Białoszewski’s literary practice. All kinds of impurities, including the poet’s way of spoking and his corporeality as well as the spatial context of recording, have been treated here as full-fledged sense-forming elements, having both archival and interpretative value.

The article concerns the Themerson Archive in Warsaw, which for nearly three decades was prepared for publication by art critic Jasia Reichardt. She not only sorted out these collections, but also acted as an intermediary between the artists, the Archive, and the audience. In this case, the curatorship of the archive is an effort to bring the individual parts of the collection closer to the audience by creating a narrative about the history of individual artifacts. The curator has bestowed on the materials a broad biographical context. In her article, Honorata Sroka comes up with the idea of the curatorship of archival collections. She develops a specific approach to curatorship by describing Reichardt’s exhibition methods, i.e., the latter’s strategies of presentation and presence in the Themerson Archive. Sroka moves away from the classic approaches to the theory of archives by regarding the curator’s activities not only as attempts to limit the public’s access to knowledge about the artists and the desire to guard their collections, but rather as organizational efforts aimed at formulating a coherent method for the presentation of materials. Moreover, Sroka emphasizes the fact that Reichardt’s experience as a long-time curator of art exhibitions, the author of numerous articles, and the director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London has allowed her to make a highly original contribution to the field of archival studies.

In his article, Kamil Myszkowski is concerned with the issues of the archive as they emerge from his analysis of the archaeology of photography, which is a creative concept of the Gliwice-based artist photographer Jerzy Lewczyński. Lewczyński was focused on working with the archive: collecting, researching and analyzing, and reusing the collected photographs, documents, and souvenirs. This artistic concept also bears the hallmarks of a theoretical position and of a research strategy. The article broadly discusses Lewczyński’s approach to the archive and the collections; it also presents the collection itself and its unique features.

In his essay, Maciej Topolski reflects on amateur photo albums. He starts from the etymology of the word “album” as designating “something that is white” (a white board in ancient Rome, a book with blank white pages in the present). Next, he describes the limitations of memory in the context of photography as a visual medium, the albums he collects, their relationship with orality, and their openness to new interpretations, i.e., to interpretations and narratives different to those belonging to the former album owners. Topolski concludes his essay with reflections on forgetfulness in the context of the disappearance of the visual form of memory – as represented by the photo album – and on its possible future developments.

Katarzyna Szkaradnik’s article is devoted to the archival work of Józef Pilch, a well-known Silesian bibliophile, diarist, biographer and cultural activist from Ustroń, who, above all, was also an amateur historian researching and popularizing the history of Cieszyn Silesia. Drawing on the typology of Uriel Orlow – who divided artists interested in real and metaphorical archives into archive users, archive makers and archive thinkers – Szkaradnik examines Pilch’s activity as a user, creator, and critic of the archive. A self-taught peasant, Pilch not only used materials collected in archives and scientific libraries to shape the historical awareness of the local community with his studies, but also created his own archives. This is how we can interpret the fact that he collected (with a view to creating a dictionary) his collection of expressions of the local dialect, a rich library containing many unique publications and documents, as well as his diary and correspondence preserved in his home archive. Moreover, Pilch reflected critically on the archive as an instrument of power, as evidenced by his publications on the PPS-WRN (Polish Socialist Party – Freedom, Equality, Independence) and the history of the Jewish population in Ustroń.

The article discusses contemporary travels to Galicia in German-language literature from 1989 to 2016 and presents its thematic and focal development. After an excursus into the meaning and history of travel texts
to Galicia, which were crucial in constituting the province, the article, through drawing on the relation between mnemonics theory and archives, attempts to demonstrate how travels to historical spaces function. The following analysis is carried out on the basis of texts that draw on the historical-literary archive, which
is one of three archival types the author developed in her research.

In this paper, Anouk Herman discusses the performance project 365 drzew [365 Trees] by Cracovian artist Cecylia Malik. The project involved the artist photographing herself and publishing the photos on her Facebook profile, which she did every day for 365 days. The aim of Malik’s work was to raise the awareness of the presence of the trees in the space of the city and to propagate close, childlike encounters with nature. For this reason, among the contexts which Herman summons in this analysis of Malik’s project are ecofeminist thought as well as two literary conventions, that of girlhood and that of (partly redefined) natural jester (Pl. sowizdrzał). Herman also uses the concept of transmedia in an attempt to describe the process of its transformations, from the literary to the visual context and back, while taking consideration the performance artist’s activity on the Internet.

At the starting point of Łukasz Żurek’s article is the insight that so far the reception of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever – the work inaugurating the socalled archival turn in the humanities – has not raised the problem of the relationship between Derrida’s private archive and the idea of “archive” as he presents it in this book. Żurek’s goal is to show that Archive Fever can be treated as a quasior crypto-autographical statement. Inspired by the paradigm of Carl Ginzburg’s tropes, Żurek examines facts from Derrida’s life as described in his biography by Benoît Peeters. He also analyses scenes in two documentaries about Derrida in which the author of Of Grammatology shows the film crew around his apartment and statements from interviews in which Derrida shares his ideas on the collection of archival materials. In the concluding section of the article, by referring to the letter sent by Derrida to the president of the University of California, Żurek reflects on the unexpected conflict between Derrida’s critique of the “archontic” management of archives, developed in Archive Fever, and his practice.

The starting point in this interview with Ewa Zarzycka is the shortest definition of performance, according to which performance is only “man, space and time”. This definition is an occasion for the artist’s reflections, which step by step lead to issues related to the transmediality of her artistic practices and the use of the archive. Among the main topics addressed in the interview are the blurring of boundaries between image and text as well as the elimination of divisions within art and thinking about the media. Special emphasis is given to the problem of the rooting of Zarzycka’s performances and works in narrative, which is related to the linguistic “germ” of each of her performance projects.

The text is an attempt to articulate the individual experience of photography, to capture the character of real and fictitious connections with photography. Ewa Zarzycka explores the paradox of the statement “Photography is what it is not.” She embarks on a reflection on various types of memory related to photography and on the specificity of the photographic archive of “memory and imagination”. “In the photograph, everything is different” is the text of Ewa Zarzycka’s talk of the same title, which was given in 1985 in Skoki during the symposium Philosophizing Photographers. While giving this talk, Zarzycka pasted photographs into an album, which resulted in creating a “not-to-be-looked-at” object-album.

In his analysis of Ewa Zarzycka’s performative work, Aleksander Wójtowicz places emphasis on the narrative tricks the artist uses to construct and convey her message. Wójtowicz’s analysis of a selection of Zarzycka’s texts and speeches serves to identify the rhetorical tools and linguistic devices which determine the originality of her performances. Particularly interesting in this context is the video performance Videozeszyty [Videonotebooks], in which the story of a private archive is told with the help of transmedia practices.

The article, based on Wojciech Górecki’s reportages (travel narratives), examines the traces of the shattered subjectivity of the Soviet empire in its scattered peripheries: states and para-states. Referring to the Derridian triad – remnants, traces, and fragments – the literary reflection attempted here concerns the sphere of ontologization, that is, capturing the meanings emerging after the disintegration of political, social, and economic ties. Among important methodological inspirations are postcolonialism, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and the essays by Gorgio Agamben and Jean Baudrillard, which lead to the conclusion that state structures never die, but manifest their presence in spectral ways.

he article, based on the reportage texts by Wojciech Górecki, attempts to look at the traces of the shattered subjectivity of the Soviet empire in the scattered periphery: states and para-states. Referring to the Derridian triad - remains, traces and remains - the literary reflection concerns the sphere of ontologization, that is, capturing the meanings emerging after the disintegration of political, social and economic ties. An important methodological inspiration is e.g. postcolonialism, J. Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, J. Derrida's deconstruction and reading essays by G. Agamben, J. Baudrillard, which lead to the conclusion that state structures never die, but manifest their presence through spectral views.