Some questions at the Gate Foundation Archive, 25/09/2010 - 30/10/2010

During Play Van Abbe Part 3, the project, Gate Keepers takes up the ideas around the politics of collecting in relation to the Gate Foundation archives. After the foundation closed in 2006, its archives have been housed in the Van Abbemuseum library. The Gate Keepers project seeks to open up questions and conversations around the Gate Foundation’s work since its inception in 1988, using it as a case study to speak more broadly about the establishing of links between the so-called “non-Western artistic world” and the Netherlands. The project will consist of a presentation of (parts of the) archives by invited guests from those regions in the world represented in the Gate Foundation archive as well as those who are not....(vanabbemuseum.nl)
My dear friend and colleage, the curator Clare Butcher, ask me a year ago, about an intervention with the project "Gate Keepers" at the library of Van AbbeMuseum.
For me, an archive is like a treasure chest. You never know what you could find there!

So I decided to look at the Gate Foundation archive just for myself.

I come from the Canary Islands, do you know it? It’s a Spanish Archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean; near Africa…Most people thinks that it’s just a touristic place with beaches and great weather. But it’s much more tha this.

I saw this huge amount of books about non-western, non-European art, and a lot of questions came up. My first question was: what place does the Canary Islands occupy from here (Holland)? What place does it have in the Gate Foundation archive? What is our place in the contemporary artworld?

We always thought in Canary Islands that we were like a connection point between continents. A mix of west and non-west, of colonizer and colonized...but actually, from here in Holland, it's like we are part of it. We are a little piece in the puzzle.

We were non-west and after that west. But we are geographically out of Europe. Now we are one of the seven “ultra-peripheral regions” (UPR) of the EU (the Azores, the four French overseas departments, the Canaries and Madeira) –– that actually means ultra-secondary too! But we are the door for thousands of immigrants that came from Africa to Europe.

In our history, we were colonized and after, we were colonizers ourselves, of America. We are everything but we are not inside, because we are in the middle. And it seems to me that the art from the Canary Islands has a powerful mix of all these influences. If we are Islands, where are our borders? Are we inside or outside? Is the sea a border or a door? Are the borders the new doors to stay in touch? Who make the borders now? Could we still use the old term “border”?

I’ve been looking at the Gate Foundation archive for the publications of CAAM (Atlantic Art Modern Centre from Gran Canaria) and some related artists and exhibitions. Would you like to join me? Answer some of my questions or just ask your own...

After a year, I would love to check again the archives. Now, that the world is running up between social revolutions through Africa and Europe...I wonder if Canary Islands is already aware of their position. Our place: "in and out" of the social-cultural west history give us an exceptional perspective to see, to understand, to analyze, to participate...Until this moment, we renounced something about our history or we do prefer to accept the western part...now when the west is shaking...where is our place? what shall we do?...

(c) Photography: Emilio Moreno.