The Archive’s Shadow

Lynn Cazabon is a visual artist whose work poses questions about human progress by focusing on what gets left behind in its wake. Cazabon will discuss her project Discard, which consists of several discrete series of large-scale photographic prints featuring movie films discarded by public institutions (libraries, schools, archives). Harking back to the 19th century practice of postmortem photography, each print in this body of work serves as a memento mori to the recently obsolete medium of film. In its totality, Discard is a shadow archive, reflecting that which has been omitted from institutional archives and reflecting upon a process by which values are reversed: whereby something once valued becomes worthless and looses its viability as a cultural artifact. The project also underlines our current reliance on potentially unstable digital technologies to preserve the things we deem to be worth saving and asks what is lost when we don’t save such physical artifacts (like film) but only transfer its image to digital media. Cazabon will also discuss the notion of the archive as it plays out in her other projects.

We regret that the audio is not available for Lynn Cazabon's digital dialogue. However, video and slides are available for viewing.