Earlier this year, LI-MA organised the event Moniek Toebosch: Questions about the Archive, the first in a series of events about how to care for the work and legacy of the artist. Through the event and the discussions that followed, the facilitators invited people to share their personal memories of her. The Roundtable talk held on the 21st of October, used this as a starting point to reflect on what it means for an archive to hold works that move between performance, sound and installation without sitting comfortably in any one of them. The Roundtable applied an interdisciplinary lens, joining composers, dramaturgs, archivists, scholars, artists, technicians and journalists together to discuss and engage with the oeuvre of Moniek Toebosch. The participants explored Moniek's legacy and how it can continue to be engaged with and presented.
Taken together with the case studies Painthouse (as performed at the Holland Festival in 1981) and Les Douleurs Contemporaines (1995-2001), these questions drew the conversation towards the contextualization of Moniek's practice: how she worked, what motivated her, the venues and audiences she interacted with, the time and environment in which she created, and the impression she left. Precisely because she rarely offered a fixed artist's statement about her works' meaning, we are left with many voices and memories that have to be held and evaluated side by side, none of which can be captured by a recording or document alone.
As the conversation continued, the focus turned to the immediate and long-term intentions for the archive, guided by the questions "What do you want to remain accessible for future generations through the archive?" and "How do we want new generations to come into contact with the work?".
Questions moving forward
The afternoon produced a clearer sense of the questions worth asking and of who needs to be part of asking and responding to them. It also created the connections and space to encourage unconventional approaches and interdisciplinary exchange on equal footing. We want to foster this space and encourage you to continue to engage, share insights and your expertise on these questions. These discussions will shape the next event on 25 November at LAB111 (Digital Care: Moniek Toebosch - Performing the Archive, Archiving the Performance), as well as the careful and creative shared work of looking after Moniek Toeboch’s legacy.
How do you archive process? Is the object of preservation the idiomatic practice itself, the conditions that made the practice possible, or the artist's documentation of the work?
Moniek rarely stated what her works meant directly. How do we mediate the context in which these works were created for a contemporary public?
This post was co-authored by LI-MA interns Thea Jansen and Anna Sofia Neil. Thea is focusing on the Montevideo archive, and Anna Sofia is focusing on the audio-visual collection of the Moniek Toebosch archive.
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